Prospects for Reconstructing Daily Runoff from Individual Upstream Remotely-Sensed Climatic Variables

Abstract

Basin water supply, planning, and its allocation requires runoff measurements near an estuary mouth. However, insufficient financial budget results in no further runoff measurements at critical in situ stations. This has recently promoted the runoff reconstruction via regression between the runoff and nearby remotely-sensed variables on a monthly scale. Nonetheless, reconstructing daily runoff from individual basin-upstream remotely-sensed climatic variables is yet to be explored. This study investigates standardized data regression approach to reconstruct daily runoff from the individual remotely-sensed climatic variables at the Mekong Basin’s upstream. Compared to simple linear regression, the daily runoff reconstructed and forecasted from the presented approach were improved by at most 5% and 10%, respectively. Reconstructed runoffs using neural network models yielded ~0.5% further improvement. The improvement was largely a function of the reduced discrepancy during dry and wet seasons. The best forecasted runoff obtained from the basin-upstream standardized precipitation index, yielded the lowest normalized root-mean-square error of 0.093.