Calibration of hydrological models in ungauged basins based on satellite radar altimetry observations of river water level

This paper proposes a new orientation to address the problem of hydrological model calibration in ungauged basin. Satellite radar altimetric observations of river water level at basin outlet are used to calibrate the model, as a surrogate of streamflow data. To shift the calibration objective, the hydrological model is coupled with a hydraulic model describing the relation between streamflow and water stage. The methodology is illustrated by a case study in the Upper Mississippi Basin using TOPEX/Poseidon (T/P) satellite data. The generalized likelihood uncertainty estimation (GLUE) is employed for model calibration and uncertainty analysis. We found that even without any streamflow information for regulating model behavior, the calibrated hydrological model can make fairly reasonable streamflow estimation. In order to illustrate the degree of additional uncertainty associated with shifting calibration objective and identifying its sources, the posterior distributions of hydrological parameters derived from calibration based on T/P data, streamflow data and T/P data with fixed hydraulic parameters are compared. The results show that the main source is the model parameter uncertainty. And the contribution of remote sensing data uncertainty is minor. Furthermore, the influence of removing high error satellite observations on streamflow estimation is also examined. Under the precondition of sufficient temporal coverage of calibration data, such data screening can eliminate some unrealistic parameter sets from the behavioral group. The study contributes to improve streamflow estimation in ungauged basin and evaluate the value of remote sensing in hydrological modeling. Copyright © 2011 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.