Improving streamflow simulations and forecasting performance of SWAT model by assimilating remotely sensed soil moisture observations

This article presents a study carried out using EnKF based assimilation of coarser-scale SMOS soil moisture retrievals to improve the streamflow simulations and forecasting performance of SWAT model in a large catchment. This study has been carried out in Munneru river catchment, India, which is about 10,156 km2. In this study, an EnkF based new approach is proposed for improving the inherent vertical coupling of soil layers of SWAT hydrological model during soil moisture data assimilation. Evaluation of the vertical error correlation obtained between surface and subsurface layers indicates that the vertical coupling can be improved significantly using ensemble of soil storages compared to the traditional static soil storages based EnKF approach. However, the improvements in the simulated streamflow are moderate, which is due to the limitations in SWAT model in reflecting the profile soil moisture updates in surface runoff computations. Further, it is observed that the durability of streamflow improvements is longer when the assimilation system effectively updates the subsurface flow component. Overall, the results of the present study indicate that the passive microwave-based coarser-scale soil moisture products like SMOS hold significant potential to improve the streamflow estimates when assimilating into large-scale distributed hydrological models operating at a daily time step.