H51T-01
Remote Sensing Observations of Snow and Soil Moisture for Snowmelt Flood Predictions in the Red River of the North Basin
Friday, 18 December 2015: 08:00
3022 (Moscone West)
Samuel E Tuttle1,2, Jennifer M Jacobs3, Carrie Vuyovich4, Eunsang Cho2, Pedro J Restrepo5, Xinhua Jia6, Michael H Cosh7, Michael M Deweese5, Brian Connelly5 and Steve Buan8, (1)Boston University, Boston, MA, United States, (2)University of New Hampshire Main Campus, Durham, NH, United States, (3)Univ New Hampshire, Durham, NH, United States, (4)University of New Hampshire, Hanover, NH, United States, (5)NOAA Natioal Weather Service, Minneapolis, MN, United States, (6)North Dakota State University, Fargo, ND, United States, (7)USDA Agricultural Research Service New England Plant, Soil and Water Research Laboratory, East Wareham, MA, United States, (8)NOAA/NWS/North Central River Forecast Center, Chanhassen, MN, United States
Abstract:
The northward-flowing Red River of the North Basin (RRB), located in eastern North Dakota and western Minnesota, is vulnerable to frequent floods due to its flat terrain and low permeability soil. A vast majority of floods in the basin occur during the snowmelt season, when the winter snowpack thaws and spring rains fall onto saturated soils. This causes the Red River to spill over shallow banks and across the floodplain. The region has sparse in situ observations of snow and soil moisture, making flood prediction in the RRB difficult. Remote sensing data can help to capture magnitude, timing, and spatial distribution of watershed scale snow, soil moisture, and snowmelt parameters in the RRB, which will allow for better characterization of the watershed’s hydrologic state. This research examines snow water equivalent (SWE; from the AMSR-E, AMSR2, and SSM/I satellite instruments), soil moisture (from AMSR-E, SMOS, and SMAP), and snow covered area (SCA; from MODIS), along with modeled SWE and snow depth from NOAA’s National Operational Hydrologic Remote Sensing Center (NOHRSC) SNOw Data Assimilation System (SNODAS). These data are compared with observations from local and federal snow surveys, NOHRSC Airborne Gamma Radiation Snow Survey Program flights, NOAA National Climate Data Center (NCDC) cooperative network sites, Natural Resource Conservation Service (NRCS) Soil Climate Analysis Network (SCAN) sites, and the North Central River Forecast Center’s (NCRFC) model states, in order to determine data quality as well as strengths and weaknesses of satellite observations for RRB flood forecasting. Future analyses will include evaluation of freeze/thaw state information from the Soil Moisture Active-Passive (SMAP) satellite, and explore the potential for flood forecasting improvement by updating state variables of the NOAA National Weather Service (NWS) operational forecasting models with remotely sensed fields.
