HESSD Hydrology and Earth System Sciences Discussions HESSD Hydrol. Earth Syst. Sci. Discuss. 1812-2116 Göttingen, Germany 10.5194/hessd-8-1329-2011 Assimilation of MODIS snow cover area data in a distributed hydrological model Thirel G. 1 Salamon P. 1 Burek P. 1 Kalas M. 1 European Commission, Joint Research Centre, Institute for Environment and Sustainability, Ispra, Italy 28 01 2011 8 1 1329 1364 Copyright: © 2011 G. Thirel et al. 2011 This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported License. To view a copy of this licence, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/ This article is available from https://hess.copernicus.org/preprints/8/1329/2011/hessd-8-1329-2011.html The full text article is available as a PDF file from https://hess.copernicus.org/preprints/8/1329/2011/hessd-8-1329-2011.pdf

Snow is an important component of the water cycle and its estimation in hydrological models is of great importance concerning snow melting flood events simulations and forecasting. The LISFLOOD model is a spatially distributed hydrological model designed at the Joint Research Centre for large European river basins. It is used for a variety of applications including flood forecasting and assessing the effects of land use change and climate change. In order to improve the streamflow simulations of this model, especially with respect to snowmelt induced floods, the assimilation of Snow Cover Area (SCA) has been evaluated in this study. For this purpose daily 420 m-resolution MODIS satellital SCA data have been used, which were then converted in Snow Water Equivalent (SWE) using a Snow Depletion Curve. Tests were performed over the Morava basin, a tributary of the Danube, for a period of almost three years. Two data assimilation techniques, the Ensemble Kalman Filter (EnKF) and the particle filter, were compared, for assimilating the MODIS composites of SCA every seven days. Two approaches were tested, in which the SWE of the model was adjusted either using three altitudinal-based zones or seven sub-basins-based zones. These experiments showed the improvement of the SWE of the model when compared with MODIS-derived snow for both the EnKF and the particle filter. However, on average only the particle filter improved the discharge simulation, because the EnKF imposed too important water balance modifications, which deteriorated the simulation of the discharges during the snow melt periods.

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