Development and validation of remote sensing products of hydrological cycle to close water balance at river basin scale

Abstract

Development and validation of hydrological cycle elements derived from remote sensing observations are of utmost importance for the study of hydrology at different scales, especially at watershed scale. This paper presents the progress we have made in developing and validating watershed scale hydrological cycle products, mainly including precipitation, snow cover area (SCA), soil moisture (SM), evapotranspiration (ET) and groundwater variation. Corresponding high quality remote sensing products (RSPs) have been produced. In addition, to validate the RSPs of water cycle variables, we established several ground observation networks which can provide extensive and high quality validation dataset. Our efforts significantly improve our understanding in watershed water cycle variables, and the developed water cycle products and validation data products have been widely used in several research domains, providing supporting for several key research projects. Based on these efforts, the developed and validated RSPs having been merged into hydrological and land surface models with the aid of land data assimilation method, to allow us to close the water cycle at the basin scale, and further improve our knowledge on terrestrial water study.