ASSESSING THE APPLICABILITY OF HYDROLOGIC INFORMATION FROM RADAR IMAGERY

摘要

During the last two decades, the potential of radar remote sensing in the retrieval of the water content of the near-surface unsaturated soil zone has been explored. This water content is usually referred to as soil moisture. The inversion of radar observations into soil moisture values has been hampered by an insufficient characterization of the soil roughness. However, some studies have focused on relating temporal changes of the radar signal to hydrologic relevant information. One result is presented here, where we show that variable source areas, which are mainly responsible for runoff in a catchment, can be visualized through a principal component analysis. A second part of this paper shows how soil moisture information obtained from radar imagery can be incorporated into hydrologic models. A first example uses an extended Kalman filtering technique, which adjusts the state variables from a hydrologic model. Through this technique, one-dimensional soil moisture profiles are retrieved with high accuracy. In a second example, we show a data-assimilation method which uses both the statistics and the spatial distribution of radar-retrieved soil moisture values, to adjust the modeled soil moisture profile. This methodology enables a better modeling of the rainfall-runoff behavior of the catchment.