The impacts of assimilating satellite soil moisture into a rainfall-runoff model in a semi-arid catchment

Abstract

Soil moisture plays a key role in runoff generation processes, and the assimilation of soil moisture observations into rainfall-runoff models is regarded as a way to improve their prediction accuracy. Given the scarcity of in situ measurements, satellite soil moisture observations offer a valuable dataset that can be assimilated into models; however, very few studies have used these coarse resolution products to improve rainfall-runoff model prediction. In this work we evaluate the assimilation of satellite soil moisture into the probability distributed model (PDM) for the purpose of reducing flood prediction uncertainty in an operational context. The surface soil moisture (SSM) and the soil..