Hydrological model using ground- and satellite-based data for river flow simulation towards supporting water resource management in the Red River Basin, Vietnam

Abstract

The Red River basin (RRB) exhibits substantial variation of water resource seasonally and annually. Sustainable water resource management in the RRB has been challenging due to the lack of in situ hydrological measurement data over the basin-wide scale. To address this issue, this study aimed to perform the setting up, calibration, and validation of the variable infiltration capacity (VIC) hydrological model forced with ground- and satellite-based datasets at a high spatial resolution of 0.1° for simulating the daily river flow of the Red River system in the RRB during the period of 2005-2014. By using the finely resolved land cover characterization with 15 types of land cover and leaf area index - the most important feature of vegetation that significantly influences the simulation of hydrological variables provided by the spatially distributed satellite remote sensing data, this study would not only address the poor data availability over the RRB but also enhance the accuracy of model simulation. The simulation results generally indicated that the calibrated VIC model could satisfactorily capture the river flow dynamics of the Red River system in the RRB. The VIC model's underestimated river flow compared to the observed data during the dry season for the downstream stations was likely due to the operation of the large man-made reservoirs and dams in the upstream catchments of the RRB that not represented by the VIC model. The findings also suggested that for further improving the VIC model performance, the use of more spatially representative meteorological data provided by satellite remote sensing should be considered in future studies.

Keywords: Model performance/evaluation; Red River system; River flow simulation; Satellite remote sensing; Variable infiltration capacity (VIC) model.