Validation of remote sensing soil moisture products with a distributed continuous hydrological model

The reliable estimation of soil moisture in space and time is of fundamental importance in operational hydrology to improve the forecast of the rainfall-runoff response of catchments and, consequently, flood predictions. Nowadays several satellite-derived soil moisture products are available and can offer a chance to improve hydrological model performances especially in environments with scarce ground based data. The goal of this work is to test the effects of the assimilation of different satellite soil moisture products in a distributed physically based hydrological model. Among the currently available different satellite platforms, four soil moisture products, from both the ASCAT scatterometer and the SMOS radiometer, have been assimilated using a Nudging scheme. The model has been applied to a test basin (area about 800 km²) located in Northern Italy for the period July 2012-June 2013.