Using remote sensing to monitor surface freshwater storage in the Congo basin

Abstract:

Despite the global importance of the Congo Basin, which is the second largest river basin in the world, only a small number of studies to date have focused on its hydro-climatic variability. The limited understanding of climate dynamics in the Congo Basin is in part due to the lack of the in situ monitoring of climate variables in that area. Given the vast size of the Congo Basin, remote sensing observations provide the only viable approach to understanding the spatial and temporal variability of the basin’s hydro-climatic patterns. To apprehend the water cycle of the Congo basin it is important to know how the freshwater is stored in this basin and its spatial and temporal dynamics. In this study, a multi-satellite approach is proposed to estimate the water stored in the floodplains of the Congo Basin at monthly time-scale using the surface water extent from the Global Inundation Extent Multi-Satellite (GIEMS) and the water level fluctuations derived from ENVISAT Radar Altimeter. The combination of these datasets for their overlapping period of record, from 2003 to 2007, enabled us to compute water level maps from which we estimated surface water storage in the Congo Basin.