An open-book watershed model for prototyping space-borne flood monitoring systems in International River Basins

A new era involving both simple and complex hydrologic modeling of un-gauged river basins may now emerge with the anticipated global availability of high resolution satellite rainfall data from the proposed Global Precipitation Measurement (GPM) mission. This era of application pertains to rapid prototyping of GPM-based flood monitoring systems for downstream nations in International River Basins (IRBs) where basin-wide in-situ rainfall data is unavailable due to lack of either an infrastructure or a treaty for real-time data sharing with upstream riparian nations. In this paper, we develop, verify and apply an open-book watershed model for demonstrating the value of a parsimonious modeling scheme in quick prototyping of satellite rainfall-based flood monitoring systems for lowermost nations in flood-prone IRBs. The open-book watershed modeling concept was first formulated by Yen and Chow [1969. A laboratory study of surface runoff due to moving rainstorms. Water Resources Research 5(5), 989-1006] more than 30years ago as a convenient and pragmatic framework to understand the underlying physics behind surface hydrologic phenomena. Our developed model is based on first principles of conservation of mass and momentum that parsimoniously represents the static geophysical features of a basin with minimum calibration. Such a generic and parsimonious representation has the added potential to supplement complex hydrologic models for stakeholder involvement and conflict management in transboundary river basins, among many additional applications. We first demonstrate the physical consistency of our model through sensitivity analysis of some geophysical basin parameters pertinent to the rainfall-runoff transformation. Next, we simulate the stream-flow hydrograph for a 4-month long period using basin-wide radar (WSR-88D) rainfall data over Oklahoma assuming an open-book river basin configuration. Finally, using the radar-simulated hydrograph as the benchmark, and assuming a two-nation hypothetical IRB over Oklahoma, we explored the impact of assimilating NASA's real-time satellite rainfall data (IR-3B41RT) over the upstream nation on the flow monitoring accuracy for the downstream nation. We developed a relationship defining the improvement in flow monitoring that can be expected from assimilating IR-3B41RT over transboundary regions as a function of the relative area occupied by the downstream nation for a semi-arid region. The relative improvement in flow monitoring accuracy for the downstream nation was found to be clearly high (over 35% reduction in root mean squared error) when more than 90% of the basin is transboundary. However, flow monitoring accuracy reduces considerably and even becomes negative when 60% or less of the basin area is transboundary to the downstream nation. Our findings, although hypothetical and very regime-specific, illustrate very clearly the feasibility of utilizing anticipated GPM data to alleviate the current flood monitoring limitations experienced by many nations in IRBs through the application of a generic and parsimonious model.