Estimating Flood Discharges in Reservoir-Regulated River Basins by Integrating Synthetic SWOT Satellite Observations and Hydrologic Modeling
Publication: Journal of Hydrologic Engineering
Volume 21, Issue 4
Abstract
Lakes and reservoirs are widely used for water supply and flood control, especially during large storm events. In hydrologic modeling applications, accounting for the regulated behavior of reservoirs distributed throughout a river system poses a significant challenge, especially during flood events, when detailed reservoir operation rules and strategies are implemented. Building on this problem, this study addresses this question: Can we model reservoir water storage changes and outlet discharges based on satellite measurements of river water surface elevation and inundated areas especially during the flood event? A method is presented and evaluated using synthetic observations as a proxy for measurements from the forthcoming surface water and ocean topography (SWOT) satellite mission. The May 2010 flood event in the Cumberland River Basin is used as a case study. Based on synthetic SWOT observation, time series of water storage changes are generated and evaluated for eight reservoirs. As expected, although SWOT will provide relatively high temporal resolution measurements (i.e., three or four times per repeat cycle) compared with current point-based satellite altimeters, it provides only a 5% chance of direct observation of the 2-day flash flood event. To overcome this limitation, a new algorithm using the continuity equation and ensemble Kalman filter is presented to augment SWOT-estimated water storage changes for times between SWOT overpasses at eight reservoirs located throughout the watershed. The algorithm provides accurate storage changes with a 9% normalized RMS error (NRMSE). SWOT-estimated storage changes and reservoir routing are integrated into the Hillslope River Routing model to estimate inflows and outflows for the reservoirs. The average NRMSE for reservoir outflow is 28%, which is a 64% improvement compared with not including reservoir routing. At the watershed outlet, which integrates all eight reservoirs, the NRMSE and peak discharge error () for discharge estimates are 9 and 28%, respectively. The approach, which is entirely based on remotely sensed data and is potentially applicable in global scale models, reduced NRMSE by 73% and by 85% compared with the simulated discharges, without accounting for reservoir routing.
Get full access to this article
View all available purchase options and get full access to this article.
Acknowledgments
This work was funded by NASA’s Terrestrial Hydrology Program (NNX12AQ36G and NNX14AD82G) and New Investigator Program (NNX14AI01G). We also thank the U.S. Army Corps of Engineering’s Nashville District for providing reservoir data sets.
References
Alsdorf, D. E., Rodriguez, E., and Lettenmaier, D. P. (2007). “Measuring surface water from space.” Rev. Geophys., 45(2), RG2002.
Andreadis, K. M., Clark, E. A., Lettenmaier, D. P., and Alsdorf, D. E. (2007). “Prospects for river discharge and depth estimation through assimilation of swath-altimetry into a raster-based hydrodynamics model.” Geophys. Res. Lett., 34(10), L10403.
Bates, P. D., and De Roo, A. P. J. (2000). “A simple raster-based model for flood inundation simulation.” J. Hydrol., 236(1–2), 54–77.
Bates, P. D., Horritt, M. S., Smith, C. N., and Mason, D. (1997). “Integrating remote sensing observations of flood hydrology and hydraulic modelling.” Hydrol. Process., 11(14), 1777–1795.
Beighley, R. E., et al. (2011). “Comparing satellite derived precipitation datasets using the Hillslope River Routing (HRR) model in the Congo River Basin.” Hydrol. Process., 25(20), 3216–3229.
Beighley, R. E., Eggert, K., Wilson, C. J., Rowland, J. C., and Lee, H. (2014). “A hydrologic routing model suitable for climate-scale simulations of arctic rivers: Application to the Mackenzie River Basin.” Hydrol. Process., 29(12), 2751–2768.
Beighley, R. E., Eggert, K. G., Dunne, T., He, Y., Gummadi, V., and Verdin, K. L. (2009). “Simulating hydrologic and hydraulic processes throughout the Amazon River Basin.” Hydrol. Process., 23(8), 1221–1235.
Benke, A. C., and Cushing, C. E. (2005). Rivers of North America, Elsevier Academic Press, Burlington, MA.
Biancamaria, S., et al. (2010). “Preliminary characterization of SWOT hydrology error budget and global capabilities.” IEEE J. Sel. Top. Appl. Earth Obs. Remote Sens., 3(1), 6–19.
Biancamaria, S., Lettenmaier, D. P., and Pavelsky, T. M. (2015). “The SWOT mission and capabilities for land hydrology.” Surv. Geophys., 1–31.
Birkett, C. M. (1995). “The contribution of TOPEX/POSEIDON to the global monitoring of climatically sensitive lakes.” J. Geophys. Res., 100(C12), 25179–25204.
Casse, C., et al. (2015). “Potential of satellite rainfall products to predict Niger River flood events in Niamey.” Atmos. Res., 163, 162–176.
Créteaux, J.-F., Biancamaria, S., Arsen, A., Bergé-Nguyen, M., and Becker, M. (2015). “Global surveys of reservoirs and lakes from satellites and regional application to the Syrdarya river basin.” Environ. Res. Lett., 10(2015), 015002.
Durand, M., Fu, L., Lettenmaier, D. P., Als, D. E., Rodriguez, E., and Esteban-Fernandez, D. (2010a). “The surface water and ocean topography mission: Observing terrestrial surface water and oceanic submesoscale eddies.” Proc. IEEE., 98(5), 766–779.
Durand, M., Rodriguez, E., Alsdorf, D. E., and Trigg, M. (2010b). “Estimating river depth from remote sensing swath interferometry measurements of river height, slope, and width.” IEEE J. Sel. Top. Appl. Earth Obs. Remote Sens., 3(1), 20–31.
Easterling, D. R., Evans, J. L., Groisman, P. Ya., Karl, T. R., Kunkel, K. E., and Ambenje, P. (2000). “Observed variability and trends in extreme climate events: A brief review.” Bull. Am. Meteorol. Soc., 81(3), 417–425.
Evensen, G. (1994). “Sequential data assimilation with a nonlinear quasi-geostrophic model using Monte Carlo methods to forecast error statistics.” J. Geophys. Res., 99, 10143.
Evensen, G. (2003). “The ensemble Kalman filter: Theoretical formulation and practical implementation.” Ocean Dyn., 53(4), 343–367.
Fjørtoft, R., et al. (2014). “KaRIn on SWOT: Characteristics of near-nadir Ka-band interferometric SAR imagery.” IEEE Trans. Geosci. Remote Sens., 52(4), 2172–2185.
Fry, J. A., et al. (2011). “Completion of the 2006 national land cover database for the conterminous United States.” Photogramm. Eng. Remote Sens., 77(9), 858–864.
Gao, H., Birkett, C., and Lettenmaier, D. P. (2012). “Global monitoring of large reservoir storage from satellite remote sensing.” Water Resour. Res., 48(9), W09504.
Gleason, C. J., and Smith, L. C. (2014). “Toward global mapping of river discharge using satellite images and at-many-stations hydraulic geometry.” Proc. Nat. Acad. Sci., 111(13), 4788–4791.
Haddeland, I., et al. (2015). “Global water resources affected by human interventions and climate change.” Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci., 111(9), 3251–3256.
Hanasaki, N., Kanae, S., and Oki, T. (2006). “A reservoir operation scheme for global river routing models.” J. Hydrol., 327(1–2), 22–41.
Harman, C., Stewardson, M., and DeRose, R. (2008). “Variability and uncertainty in reach bankfull hydraulic geometry.” J. Hydrol., 351(1–2), 13–25.
Hirabayashi, Y., et al. (2013). “Global flood risk under climate change.” Nat. Clim. Change, 3(9), 816–821.
IPCC. (2012). “Managing the risks of extreme events and disasters to advance climate change adaptation.” A Special Rep. of Working Groups I and III of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, U.K., 582.
Lee, H., et al. (2011). “Characterization of terrestrial water dynamics in the Congo Basin using GRACE and satellite radar altimetry.” Remote Sens. Environ., 115(12), 3530–3538.
Lee, H., Durand, M., Jung, H. C., Alsdorf, D., Shum, C. K., and Sheng, Y. W. (2010). “Characterization of surface water storage changes in Arctic lakes using simulated SWOT measurements.” Int. J. Remote Sens., 31(14), 3931–3953.
Li, J., and Sheng, Y. (2012). “An automated scheme for glacial lake dynamics mapping using Landsat imagery and digital elevation models: A case study in the Himalayas.” Int. J. Remote Sens., 33(16), 5194–5213.
Medina, C., Gomez-Enri, J., Alonso, J. J., and Villares, P. (2010). “Water volume variations in Lake Izabal (Guatemala) from in situ measurements and ENVISAT radar altimeter (RA-2) and advanced synthetic aperture radar (ASAR) data products.” J. Hydrol., 382(1–4), 34–48.
Nagler, T., Rott, H., Malcher, P., and Muller, F. (2008). “Assimilation of meteorological and remote sensing data for snowmelt runoff forecasting.” Remote Sens. Environ., 112(4), 1408–1420.
Paiva, R. C. D., Durand, M. T., and Hossain, F. (2015). “Spatiotemporal interpolation of discharge across a river network by using synthetic SWOT satellite data.” Water Resour. Res., 51(1), 430–449.
Papa, F., Durand, F., Rossow, W. B., Rahman, A., and Bala, S. K. (2010). “Satellite altimeter-derived monthly discharge of the Ganga-Brahmaputra River and its seasonal to interannual variations from 1993 to 2008.” J. Geophys. Res., 115, C12013.
Pavelsky, T. M., and Smith, L. C. (2008). “RivWidth: A software tool for the calculation of river widths from remotely sensed imagery.” Geosci. Remote Sens. Lett., 5(1), 70–73.
Pereira-Cardenal, S. J., et al. (2011). “Real-time remote sensing driven river basin modelling using radar altimetry.” Hydrol. Earth Syst. Sci., 15(1), 241–254.
Rodríguez, E. (2014). “SWOT science requirements document. JPL document, initial release.” 〈http://swot.jpl.nasa.gov/files/SWOT_science_reqs_final.pdf〉 (Nov. 7, 2015).
Schumann, G., Bates, P. D., Horritt, M. S., Matgen, P., and Pappenberger, F. (2009). “Progress in integration of remote sensing-derived flood extent and stage data and hydraulic models.” Rev. Geophys., 47(4), RG4001.
Sheng, Y. (2008). “Theoretical accuracy analysis of water storage change for the SWOT mission.” Int. Workshop on Microwave Remote Sensing for Land Hydrology Research and Applications, Oxnard, CA.
USACE (U.S. Army Corps of Engineers). (2010). “May 2010 flood event Cumberland River Basin May 2010: After action report.” 〈https://www.hsdl.org/?view&did=21310〉 (Nov. 7, 2015).
Valipour, M. (2015a). “A comprehensive study on irrigation management in Asia and Oceania.” Arch. Agron. Soil Sci., 61(9), 1247–1271.
Valipour, M. (2015b). “Future of agricultural water management in Africa.” Arch. Agron. Soil Sci., 61(7), 907–927.
Valipour, M., Banihabib, M. E., and Behbahani, S. M. (2013). “Comparison of the ARMA, ARIMA, and the autoregressive artificial neural network models in forecasting the monthly inflow of Dez dam reservoir.” J. Hydrol., 476(7), 433–441.
Vörösmarty, C. J., Green, P., Salisbury, J., and Lammers, R. B. (2000). “Global water resources: Vulnerability from climate change and population growth.” Science, 289(5477), 284–288.
Wood, E. F., Lettenmaier, D., Liang, X., Nijssen, B., and Wetzel, S. W. (1997). “Hydrological modeling of continental-scale basins.” Annu. Rev Earth Planet Sci., 25, 279–300.
Xu, H. (2006). “Modification of normalised difference water index (NDWI) to enhance open water features in remotely sensed imagery.” Int. J. Remote Sens., 27(14), 3025–3033.
Yamazaki, D., Kanae, S., Kim, H., and Oki, T. (2011). “A physically based description of floodplain inundation dynamics in a global river routing model.” Water Resour. Res., 47(4), W04501.
Yoon, Y., and Beighley, R. E. (2015). “Simulating streamflow on regulated rivers using characteristic reservoir storage patterns derived from synthetic remote sensing data.” Hydrol. Process., 29(8), 2014–2026.
Yoon, Y., Durand, M., Merry, C. J., Clark, E. A., Andreadis, K. M., and Alsdorf, D. E. (2012). “Estimating river bathymetry from data assimilation of synthetic SWOT measurements.” J. Hydrol., 464–465, 363–375.
Yoon, Y., Durand, M., Merry, C. J., and Rodriguez, E. (2013). “Improving temporal coverage of the SWOT mission using spatiotemporal kriging.” IEEE J. Sel. Top. Appl. Earth Obs. Remote Sens., 6(3), 1719–1729.
Zhang, J., Xu, K., Yang, Y., Qi, L., Hayashi, S., and Watanabe, M. (2006). “Measuring water storage fluctuations in Lake Dongting, China, by TOPEX/Poseidon satellite altimetry.” Environ. Monit. Assess., 115(1–3), 23–37.
Zhang, S., Gao, H., and Naz, B. S. (2014). “Monitoring reservoir storage in South Asia from multisatellite remote sensing.” Water Resour. Res., 50(11), 8927–8943.
Information & Authors
Information
Published In
Journal of Hydrologic Engineering
Volume 21 • Issue 4 • April 2016
Copyright
© 2015 American Society of Civil Engineers.
History
Received: May 26, 2015
Accepted: Sep 17, 2015
Published online: Dec 21, 2015
Published in print: Apr 1, 2016
Discussion open until: May 21, 2016
Authors
Metrics & Citations
Metrics
Citations
Download citation
If you have the appropriate software installed, you can download article citation data to the citation manager of your choice. Simply select your manager software from the list below and click Download.