Estimation of Water Discharge and Its Anomalies Using Remote Sensing

The relationship between rainfall regime and the volumes of water available in rivers has always aroused great interest. The hydrologic regime of rivers is affected by El Niño-Southern Oscillation (ENSO) and Climate Change and has a direct impact on freshwater ecosystems and human water consumption. The remote sensing applied to estimation of Water Discharge (WD) has a great potential to supplement ground observations when some observation stations have been discontinued or interrupted. Such knowledge about WD has a great repercussion on management of watersheds and implementation of projects. In this study, we propose a method to estimate monthly discharge in a hydrographic basin using remote sensing. Tropical Rainfall Measuring Mission (TRMM) satellite, the products of Land Surface Temperature (LST) and Fractional Snow Cover (FSC) from Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer sensor (MODIS) of TERRA/AQUA satellites and Oceanic Niño Index are used for estimate the WD in Santa River Basin. The methodology is based on filters in frequency domain and Multiple Linear Regression (MLR) applied to climatological anomalies. Our results have a high correlation around 0.97 in the adjustment of the model (2001-2011) and 16.26 RMSE in the estimation of the discharge of water showing that this method can be employed effectively.