Assimilation of wide-swath altimetry observations to correct large-scale river routing model parameters

Abstract. Land surface models combined with river routing models are widely used to study the continental part of the water cycle. They give global estimates of water flows and storages but not without non-negligible uncertainties; among which inexact input parameters have a significant part. The incoming Surface Water and Ocean Topography (SWOT) satellite mission, with a launch schedule for 2021, will be dedicated to measure water surface elevations, widths and surface slopes of rivers larger than 100 meters at global scale. SWOT will provide a significant amount of new data for river hydrology and they could be combined, through data assimilation, to global-scale models in order to correct their input parameters and reduce their associated uncertainty. The objective of this study is to present a data assimilationplatform based on the asynchronous ensemble Kalman filter(AEnKF) that assimilates synthetical SWOT observations of water elevations to correct the input parameters of a large scale hydrologic model over a 21-day time window. The study is applied on the ISBA-CTRIP model over the Amazon basin and focuses on correcting the spatial distribution of the river Manning coefficients. The data assimilationalgorithm, tested through a set of Observing System Simulation Experiments (OSSE), is able to retrieve the true value of the Manning coefficients within one assimilation cycle most of the time and shows perspectives in tracking the Manning coefficient temporal variations. Ultimately, in order to deal with potential bias between the observed and the model bathymetry, the assimilation of water elevation anomalies was also tested and showed promising results.