[Back]

P. Laiolo, S. Gabellani, L. Pulvirenti, G. Boni, R. Rudari, F. Delogu, F. Silvestro, L. Campo, F. Fascetti, N. Pierdicca, R. Crapolicchio, S. Hasenauer, S. Puca:
"Impacts of the assimilation of remote sensing soil moisture products into a continuous distributed hydrological model";
Poster: Satellite soil moisture validation & application workshop 2014, Amsterdam, the Netherlands; 2014-07-10 - 2014-07-11.

Soil moisture is a key variable for many scientific applications such as climate modelling, water management and operational forecasting of flood, landslide, weather, drought. In particular a correct estimation of soil water content can highly affect the improvement of the accuracy of flood predictions. This variable can be monitored using in situ data, but local measurements are expensive, time consuming and hard to spatialize. Consequently remote sensing can offer a chance to provide good space-time estimates of several hydrological variables and then improve hydrological model performances. The goal of this work is to test the effects of the assimilation of satellite soil moisture on the hydrological cycle. Among the currently available different satellite platforms, four soil moisture products, from both the ASCAT scatterometer and the SMOS radiometer, have been assimilated into a continuous hydrological model using a Nudging scheme. Three soil moisture products are from ASCAT and are provided by the EUMETSAT´s H-SAF (Satellite Application Facility on Support to Operational Hydrology and Water Management) project; while for SMOS the reprocessed Level 2 soil moisture product has been considered. The model has been applied to a test basin (area about 800 km2) located in Northern Italy for the period July 2012 - June 2013. The experiments have been carried out for all the above-mentioned satellitederived measurements and the impacts on the model discharge predictions and the other hydrological variables have been tested.

http://publik.tuwien.ac.at/files/PubDat_231918.pdf