Assimilating scatterometer soil moisture data into conceptual hydrologic models at the regional scale

摘要

This paper examines the potential of scatterometer data from ERS satellitesfor improving hydrological simulations in both gauged and ungaugedcatchments. We compare the soil moisture dynamics simulated by asemidistributed hydrologic model in 320 Austrian catchments with the soilmoisture dynamics inferred from the satellite data. The most apparentdifferences occur in the Alpine areas. Assimilating the scatterometer datainto the hydrologic model during the calibration phase improves therelationship between the two soil moisture estimates without any significantdecrease in runoff model efficiency. For the case of ungauged catchments,assimilating scatterometer data does not improve the daily runoffsimulations but does provide more consistent soil moisture estimates. If themain interest is in obtaining estimates of catchment soil moisture,reconciling the two sources of soil moisture information seems to be ofvalue because of the different error structures.