Distributed Hydrological Model with New Soil Water Parameterization for Integrating Remotely Sensed Soil Moisture at Watershed Scale

Detailed vertical soil moisture profile is essential for hydrological modeling and is also often used as important diagnostic information for better understanding the surface-atmospheric interactions. This paper presents a modified ESSI distributed hydrological model that is suitable for comparing and assimilating the remotely sensed soil moisture by integrating a soil water parameterization scheme which is able to numerically calculates soil water transportations between different soil layers based on the 1D Richards equation. The newly modified ESSI hydrological model was applied to the Jinghe river basin situated in the upper stream of the Huanghe River Basin, China. The preliminary simulation experiments indicate that model performs well to reasonably predict the vertical soil water moisture profile and achieve better modeling efficiency in stream-flow prediction. The modified ESSI should be an ideal candidate as a model operator of the four dimensional data assimilation system for assimilating remotely sensed soil moisture at watershed scale.