Can assimilation of crowdsourced streamflow observations in hydrological modelling improve flood prediction?

Abstract

Monitoring stations have been used for decades to properly measure hydrological variables and better predict floods. To this end, methods to incorporate such observations into mathematical water models have also being developed, including data assimilation. Besides, in recent years, the continued technological improvement has stimulated the spread of low-cost sensors that allow for employing crowdsourced and obtain observations of hydrological variables in a more distributed way than the classic static physical sensors allow. However, such measurements have the main disadvantage to have asynchronous arrival frequency and variable accuracy. For this reason, this study aims to demonstrate how the crowdsourced streamflow observations can improve flood prediction if integrated in hydrological models. Two different types of hydrological models, applied to two case studies, are considered. Realistic (albeit synthetic) streamflow observations are used to represent crowdsourced streamflow observations in both case studies. Overall, assimilation of such observations within the hydrological model results in a significant improvement, up to 21 % (flood event 1) and 67 % (flood event 2) of the Nash–Sutcliffe efficiency index, for different lead times. It is found that the accuracy of the observations influences the model results more than the actual (irregular) moments in which the streamflow observations are assimilated into the hydrological models. This study demonstrates how networks of low-cost sensors can complement traditional networks of physical sensors and improve the accuracy of flood forecasting.