Work

Modeling River Discharge Using Automated River Width Measurements Derived from Sentinel-1 Time Series

Year: 2020

Type: article

Abstract: Against the background of a worldwide decrease in the number of gauging stations, the estimation of river discharge using spaceborne data is crucial for hydrological research, river monitoring, and water resource management. Based on the at-many-stations hydraulic geometry (AMHG) concept, a novel approach is introduced for estimating river discharge using Sentinel-1 time series within an automated workflow. By using a novel decile thresholding method, no a priori knowledge of the AMHG function or proxy is used, as proposed in previous literature. With a relative root mean square error (RRMSE) of 19.5% for the whole period and a RRMSE of 15.8% considering only dry seasons, our method is a significant improvement relative to the optimized AMHG method, achieving 38.5% and 34.5%, respectively. As the novel approach is embedded into an automated workflow, it enables a global application for river discharge estimation using solely remote sensing data. Starting with the mapping of river reaches, which have large differences in river width over the year, continuous river width time series are created using high-resolution and weather-independent SAR imaging. It is applied on a 28 km long section of the Mekong River near Vientiane, Laos, for the period from 2015 to 2018.

Source: Remote Sensing

DOI: 10.3390/rs12193236

Authors: David Mengen, Marco Ottinger, Patrick Leinenkugel, Lars Ribbe

Institutions: Forschungszentrum Jülich, Deutsches Zentrum für Luft- und Raumfahrt e. V. (DLR), TH Köln - University of Applied Sciences

Language: English

Topic: Flood Risk Assessment and Management

Subfield: Global and Planetary Change

Field: Environmental Science

Domain: Physical Sciences

SDG: Clean water and sanitation

Open Access status: gold

Estimated APC paid: $1,867