Abstract
Owing to a scarcity of in situ streamflow data in ungauged or poorly gauged basins, remote sensing data is an ideal alternative. It offers a valuable perspective into the dynamic patterns that can be difficult to examine in detail with point measurements. For hydrology, soil moisture is one of the pivotal variables which dominates the partitioning of the water and energy budgets. In this study, nine Irish catchments were used to demonstrate the feasibility of using remotely sensed soil moisture for discharge prediction in ungagged basins. Using the conceptual hydrological model “Soil Moisture Accounting and Routing for Transport” (SMART), behavioural parameter sets (BPS) were selected using two different objective functions: the Nash Sutcliffe Efficiency (NSE) and Coefficient of Determination (R2) for the calibration period. Good NSE scores were obtained from hydrographs produced using the satellite soil moisture BPS. While the mean performance shows the feasibility of using remotely sensed soil moisture, some outliers result in negative NSE scores. This highlights that care needs to be taken with parameterization of hydrological models using remotely sensed soil moisture for ungauged basin.
Highlights
The conventional ways of monitoring the earth’s hydrological circle depends upon in situ spot measurements
The results show that the Soil Moisture Accounting and Routing for Transport” (SMART) model can reproduce the observed discharge to obtain high Nash Sutcliffe Efficiency (NSE) values in most catchments and that there is a very small standard deviation across the behavioural parameter sets (BPS)
Both BPSs were able to capture low flow periods within the one standard deviation of the mean of all simulations, while the R2 BPSs were unable to match either the NSE BPS or the observations during high flows. This is expected as the NSE BPSs were determined by comparing simulated discharge to in situ observations while the R2 BPSs were determined by comparing the top soil layer in the SMART model to remote sensed soil moisture estimates
Summary
The conventional ways of monitoring the earth’s hydrological circle depends upon in situ spot measurements While such measurements absolutely provide information about discrete points within a catchment, they may be inadequate for answering specific spatial-scale research questions. Elevation of water level in the water bodies and through the inference flow in the water bodies is the one quantity that can be measured confidently and which has the merit to be an integrated measurement with respect of the catchment scale This is probably the reason that human civilizations have relied so greatly on river gauging to recognize, understand and quantify the response of the landscape to rainfall inputs [1]. PUB aimed to answer how to undertake hydrological modelling with consideration of the following: (1) the same location but under
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