Estimation of Upstream Discharge in Data-Deprived Riverine Environments

摘要

Rivers pose one of the most challenging environments to quantify as they contain elements of both land and water. Their dynamical scales are small in size relative to traditional ocean processes, and are ever-changing in their position and character. To compound the problem, many riverine environments of interest to the U.S. Navy are inaccessible or denied and typically have very little, if any, known information. To address the operational needs of the Navy in rivers, a River Simulation Tool (RST) is being developed that brings together satellite imagery and hydrodynamic and hydrological modeling. One component of the RST requires estimation of upstream discharge. To do this, the authors use NASA's Land Information System (LIS) to generate the surface runoff and subsurface base flow. They force the land surface model within LIS using satellite-derived precipitation. Finally, they generate the upstream discharge by routing the runoff and base flow using a river routing model from the University of Washington. While this approach has been demonstrated on a large scale (0.5 degrees resolution) for the combined Ganges/Brahmaputra River Basin on the Indian Sub-Continent (Brown, 2007), their challenge here is to apply these techniques to a small-scale regime (approx. 1 km). As a first test case, they chose the local Pearl River (Mississippi/Louisiana) watershed. Preliminary results are presented.