Assessment of remotely sensed near-surface soil moisture for distributed eco-hydrological model implementation

Echeverría, C., Ruiz-Pérez, G., Puertes, C., Samaniego, L., Barrett, B. and Francés, F. (2019) Assessment of remotely sensed near-surface soil moisture for distributed eco-hydrological model implementation. Water, 11(12), 2613. (doi: 10.3390/w11122613)

Abstract

The aim of this study was to implement an eco-hydrological distributed model using only remotely sensed information (soil moisture and leaf area index) during the calibration phase. Four soil moisture-based metrics were assessed, and the best alternative was chosen, which was a metric based on the similarity between the principal components that explained at least 95% of the soil moisture variation and the Nash-Sutcliffe Efficiency (NSE) index between simulated and observed surface soil moisture. The selected alternative was compared with a streamflow-based calibration approach. The results showed that the streamflow-based calibration approach, even presenting satisfactory results in the calibration period (NSE = 0.91), performed poorly in the validation period (NSE = 0.47) and Leaf Area Index (LAI) and soil moisture were neither sensitive to the spatio-temporal pattern nor to the spatial correlation in both calibration and validation periods. Hence, the selected soil moisture-based approach showed an acceptable performance in terms of discharges, presenting a negligible decrease in the validation period (ΔNSE = 0.1) and greater sensitivity to the spatio-temporal variables’ spatial representation.

• Item Type: Articles
• Additional Information: The study was supported by the Spanish projects TETIS-MED (CGL2014-58127-C3-3-R) and TETISCHANGE (RTI2018-093717-B-100), the European project iAqueduct and the Paraguayan Funding Program BECAL.
• Status: Published
• Refereed: Yes
• Glasgow Author(s) Enlighten ID: Barrett, Dr Brian

Creator Roles

Barrett, B.: Validation, Resources, Writing – review and editing, Funding acquisition

• Authors: Echeverría, C., Ruiz-Pérez, G., Puertes, C., Samaniego, L., Barrett, B., and Francés, F.
• Subjects: G Geography. Anthropology. Recreation > G Geography (General); G Geography. Anthropology. Recreation > GE Environmental Sciences
• College/School: College of Science and Engineering > School of Geographical and Earth Sciences
• Journal Name: Water
• Publisher: MDPI
• ISSN: 2073-4441
• ISSN (Online): 2073-4441
• Copyright Holders: Copyright © 2019 The Authors
• First Published: First published in Water 11(12):2613
• Publisher Policy: Reproduced under a Creative Commons License