The Impact of Satellite Soil Moisture Data Assimilation on the Hydrological Modeling of SWAT in a Highly Disturbed Catchment

Abstract

The potential of satellite soil moisture (SM) in improving hydrological modeling has been addressed in synthetic experiments, but it is less explored in real data cases. Here, we investigate the added value of Soil Moisture and Passive (SMAP) and Advanced Scatterometer (ASCAT) SM data to distributed hydrological modeling with the soil and water assessment tool (SWAT) in a highly human disturbed catchment (126, 486 km2) featuring a network of SM and streamflow observations. The investigation is based on the ensemble Kalman filter (EnKF) considering SM errors from satellite data using the triple collocation. The assimilation of SMAP and ASCAT SM improved the surface (0–10 cm) and rootzone (10–30 cm) SM at >70% and > 50% stations of the basin, respectively. However, the assimilation effects on distributed streamflow simulation of the basin are un-significant and not robust. SM assimilation improved the simulated streamflow at two upstream stations, while it deteriorated the streamflow at the remaining stations. This can be largely attributed to the poor vertical soil water coupling of SWAT, suboptimal model parameters, satellite SM data quality, humid climate, and human disturbance to rainfall-runoff processes. This study offers strong evidence of integrating satellite SM into hydrological modeling in improving SM estimation and provides implications for achieving the added value of remotely sensed SM in streamflow improvement.