Author(s): Khalidou M. Ba; Vitali Diaz; Miguel Angel Gomez-Albores; Carlos Diaz-Delgado; Nancy Najera-Mota; Ousmane Seidou; Febe Ortiz
Linked Author(s):
Keywords: Spatially distributed hydrological modelling; Rainfall-runoff modelling; TRMM; ERA-Interim; Semi-arid watershed
Abstract: Distributed hydrological simulations aid to investigate the spatio-temporal behaviour of hydrological variables. However, data to feed hydrological models are not always available mainly due to lack of gauges or high retrieval fees. In this paper, two 0.25-degree daily precipitation databases from the Tropical Rainfall Measuring Mission (TRMM) were tested to simulate daily runoff in the basin of the main Upper Niger River tributary. Precipitation data are TRMM and TRMM Real Time (RT) 3B42V7. For runoff simulation, CEQUEAU hydrological distributed model was chosen. To estimate the evaporation in the model, daily temperatures were retrieved from the third-generation reanalysis ERA-Interim. From gauges and both TRMM data, monthly basin precipitation was calculated and compared to analyse the performance of TRMM to estimate rainfall. Runoff was simulated by three sources of precipitation: gauges, TRMM and TRMMRT. In all simulations, ERA-Interim temperatures were used. By Nash-Sutcliffe Error (NSE) and Coefficient of Determinationmodel performance was evaluated through comparison of daily discharges with simulations for both calibration and validation periods. Results show correlation of TRMM by 0.95 and TRMMRT by 0.91 with rain gauge data. Moreover, both TRMM products combined with ERA-Interim temperature were found suitable for daily runoff modelling with NSE> 0.835 and R2> 0.872.
Year: 2018