CaMa-Flood is a global scale model for simulating hydrodynamics in large scale rivers. It can simulate river hydrodynamics such as river discharge, flooded area, water depth and so on by inputting water runoff derived from land surface model. Recently many improvements at parameters or terrestrial data are under process to enhance the reproducibility of true natural phenomena. However, there are still some errors between nature and simulated result due to uncertainties in each model.
SWOT (Surface water and Ocean Topography) is a satellite, which is going to be launched in 2021, can measure open water surface elevation. SWOT observed data can be used to calibrate hydrodynamics model at river flow forecasting and is expected to improve model’s accuracy. Combining observation data into model to calibrate is called data assimilation.
In this research, we developed data-assimilated river flow simulation system in global scale, using CaMa-Flood as river hydrodynamics model and simulated SWOT as observation data.
Generally at data assimilation, calibrating “model value“ with ”observation value” makes “assimilated value”. However, the observed data of SWOT satellite will not be available until its launch in 2021. Instead, we simulated the SWOT observed data using CaMa-Flood. Putting “pure input” into CaMa-Flood produce “true water storage”. Extracting actual daily swath of SWOT from “true water storage” made simulated observation. For “model value”, we made “disturbed water storage” by putting “noise disturbed input” to CaMa-Flood. Since both “model value” and “observation value” are made by same model, we named this twin simulation. At twin simulation, simulated observation of “true water storage” is combined with “disturbed water storage” to make “assimilated value”. As the data assimilation method, we used ensemble Kalman filter. If “assimilated value” is closer to “true water storage” than “disturbed water storage”, the data assimilation can be marked effective. Also by changing the input disturbance of “disturbed water storage”, acceptable rate of uncertainty at the input may be discussed.