Catchment Tomography

Research Area:
Hydrology; meteorology; land surface-atmosphere interactions; subsurface hydrodynamics

Discharge is a highly integrated signal containing information on e.g. surface and subsurface flow and storage properties, precipitation, evapotranspiration and topography. We want to decompose this signal with the aim of estimating spatially distributed hydraulic parameters. Therefore, discharge measurements are assimilated into a distributed hydrological model (ParFlow) and used for updating model parameters. The model is forced with high resolution radar precipitation data. Precipitation varies strongly with time and space, generating runoff and stream discharge along many different paths and time frames. Many orthogonal signals are produced and measured as stream runoff, containing information on different subspaces of the watershed, depending on the precipitation pattern.

Our approach resembles tomography: We want to determine the spatially distributed parameters from precipitation and discharge measurements. In other words, precipitation serves as the transmitter in our tomographic experiment, the catchment is the object to be examined and discharge is the output signal, which will be inverted to gain information on the catchment's hydraulic parameters. The Ensemble Kalman Filter and the Ensemble Kalman Smoother will be applied for this new approach, which we call catchment tomography.

Cooperation partner:

n/a