CEE Seminar: Progress on Development, Validation & Data Assimilation of Remote Sensing Products of Hydrological Cycle over the Heihe River Basin in Northwest China

Abstract:  The water cycle is a reflection of the complexity of water interaction among ground, surface and atmosphere. Understanding the water cycle of an inland river basin mostly located in an arid region is important for local water resource management. The Heihe River Basin (HRB), located in the middle part of the Hexi corridor in the arid region of northwestern China, is the second largest inland river basin and is representative of all inland river basins. In order to improve the ability of forecasting and comprehensive analysis on the deduction of water-ecology-economic integrating systems under climate change over the inland basin, since 2010, the “Major Research Plan on the HRB” has been initiated by the National Natural Science Foundation of China, and numerous studies on the water, atmosphere, ecology and anthropogenic activities in the HRB have been conducted. From 2008 to 2016, the Chinese Academy of Sciences funded two projects - Watershed Allied Telemetry Experiment Research (WATER) and the Heihe Watershed Allied Telemetry Experimental Research (HiWATER) -  to improve the observability of hydrological and ecological processes and to enhance the applicability of remote sensing in integrated eco-hydrological studies at the basin scale. These studies have been crucial in supporting the sustainable development of the inland river basins. This presentation will describe the progress of estimating and evaluating the water cycle’s components including precipitation, evapotranspiration, soil moisture, snow water equivalent, runoff and groundwater storage using multi-source remote-sensing observation and in situ observation over the Heihe River Basin. It also will introduce the process of integrating these components with hydrology and land surface modeling by data assimilation to precisely close the land-water budget at the river basin scale.

Speaker Bio:  Xiaoduo Pan is an associate professor at the Cold and Arid Regions Environmental Institute, Chinese Academy of Sciences. Pan had received a Monbukagakusho Scholarship from the Japanese Government to study in the Tokyo University of Agriculture and Technology. She is currently a visiting scholar at the Center for Hydrometeorology & Remote Sensing (CHRS), Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, UC Irvine. Pan’s research is in the area of hydrologic downscaling, land surface hydrologic process modeling and hydrologic data assimilation. She has published more than 30 papers in peer-reviewed journals.