Merging Satellite and Gauge Rainfalls for Flood Forecasting of Two Catchments Under Different Climate Conditions

As satellite rainfall data has the advantages of wide spatial coverage and high spatial and temporal resolution, it is an important means to solve the problem of flood forecasting in ungauged basins (PUB). In this paper, two catchments under different conditions, Xin’an River Basin and Wuding River Basin, were selected as the representatives of humid and arid regions, respectively, and four kinds of satellite rainfall data of TRMM 3B42RT, TRMM 3B42V7, GPM IMERG Early, and GPM IMERG Late were selected to evaluate the monitoring accuracy of rainfall processes in the two catchments on hourly scale. Then, these satellite rainfall data were respectively integrated with the gauged data. HEC-HMS (The Hydrologic Engineering Center's-Hydrologic Modeling System) model was calibrated and validated to simulate flood events in the two catchments. Then, improvement effect of the rainfall merging on flood forecasting was evaluated. According to the research results, in most cases, the Nash–Sutcliffe efficiency coefficients of the simulated streamflow from initial TRMM (Tropical Rainfall Measuring Mission) and GPM (Global Precipitation Measurement) satellite rainfall data were negative at the two catchments. By merging gauge and TRMM rainfall, the Nash–Sutcliffe efficiency coefficient is mostly around 0.7, and the correlation coefficient is as high as 0.9 for streamflow simulation in the Xin'an River basin. For the streamflow simulated by merging gauge and GPM rainfall in Wuding River basin, the Nash–Sutcliffe efficiency coefficient is about 0.8, and the correlation coefficient is more than 0.9, which indicate good flood forecasting accuracy. Generally, higher performance statistics were obtained in the Xin'an River Basin than the Wuding River Basin. Compared with the streamflow simulated by the initial satellite rainfalls, significant improvement was obtained by the merged rainfall data, which indicates a good prospect for application of satellite rainfall in hydrological forecasting. In the future, it is necessary to further improve the monitoring accuracy of satellite rainfall products and to develop the method of merging multi-source rainfall data, so as to better applications in PUB and other hydrological researches.