The Use of H-SAF Soil Moisture Products for Operational Hydrology: Flood Modelling over Italy

Hydrology

Christian Massari²  Luca Brocca²  Luca Ciabatta²  Tommaso Moramarco²  Simone Gabellani⁵  Clement Albergel⁴  Patricia De Rosnay⁴  Silvia Puca¹  Wolfgang Wagner³ 

[1] Italian Civil Protection Department, Via Vitorchiano 2, 00189 Rome, Italy; E-Mail:;Research Institute for Geo-Hydrological Protection, National Research Council CNR, Via di Madonna Alta 126, 06128 Perugia, Italy; E-Mails:;Department of Geodesy and Geoinformation, Vienna University of Technology, 1040 Vienna, Austria; E-Mail:;European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts (ECMWF), Shinfield Park, RG2 9AX Reading, UK; E-Mails:;International Centre on Environmental Monitoring (CIMA) Research Foundation, Via A. Magliotto, 2-17100 Savona, Italy; E-Mail:

关键词: soil moisture;    floods;    remote sensing;    hydrological modelling;   

DOI  :  10.3390/hydrology2010002

来源: mdpi

【 摘 要 】

The ever-increasing availability of new remote sensing and land surface model datasets opens new opportunities for hydrologists to improve flood forecasting systems. The current study investigates the performance of two operational soil moisture (SM) products provided by the “EUMETSATSatellite Application Facility in Support of Operational Hydrology and Water Management” (H-SAF, http://hsaf.meteoam.it/) within a recently-developed hydrological model called the “simplified continuous rainfall-runoff model” (SCRRM) and the possibility of using such a model at an operational level. The model uses SM datasets derived from external sources (i.e., remote sensing and land surface models) as input for calculating the initial wetness conditions of the catchment prior to the flood event. Hydro-meteorological data from 35 Italian catchments ranging from 800 to 7400 km were used for the analysis for a total of 593 flood events. The results show that H-SAF operational products used within SCRRM satisfactorily reproduce the selected flood events, providing a median Nash–Sutcliffe efficiency index equal to 0.64 (SM-OBS-1) and 0.60 (SM-DAS-2), respectively. Given the results obtained along with the parsimony, the simplicity and independence of the model from continuously-recorded rainfall and evapotranspiration data, the study suggests that: (i) SM-OBS-1 and SM-DAS-2 contain useful information for flood modelling, which can be exploited in flood forecasting; and (ii) SCRRM is expected to be beneficial as a component of real-time flood forecasting systems in regions characterized by low data availability, where a continuous modelling approach can be problematic.

【 授权许可】

CC BY   
© 2015 by the authors; licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland.