Impact analysis of satellite rainfall products on flow simulations in the Magdalena River Basin, Colombia

Abstract

The Magdalena River is the most important river in Colombia in terms of economic activities and is home to about 77% of the country’s population. The river faces water resources allocation challenges, which require reliable hydrological assessments. However, hydrological analysis and model simulations are hampered by insufficient and uncertain knowledge of the actual rainfall fields. In this research the reliability of groundbased measurements, different satellite products of rainfall and their combinations are tested for their impact on the discharge simulations of the Magdalena River. Two different satellite rainfall products from the Tropical Rainfall Measuring Mission (TRMM), have been compared and merged with the ground-based measurements and their impact on the Magdalena river flows quantified using the Representative Elementary Watershed (REW) distributed hydrological model.

Keywords

• Satellite precipitation estimates
• Flow simulations
• Hydrological modeling
• Representative Elementary Watershed (REW) approach
• Orographic effects