Selected Inputs of Siting Considerations for Satellite Observation of River Discharge

Uncertainty of satellite discharge estimates is affected by choice of satellite sensor, hydraulic variable for observation, and discharge estimation algorithm, as well as the availability of ground-calibration data. Site selection is very important for reducing error and uncertainty in both conventional and satellite-based discharge measurements because geomorphic river characteristics have strong control over the relationships between discharge and depth, width, slope, and velocity. A ground-truth data set of 8,445 conventional hydraulic measurements, collected by acoustic Doppler current profilers (ADCP) at 503 stations in the United States was developed to examine correlation between river discharge and river width, depth, velocity, and cross-sectional area. This dataset (titled “1_swot”) was filtered from the HYDRoacoustic dataset in support of Surface Water Oceanographic Topography, a data set that aggregates channel and flow data collected from the United States Geological Survey (USGS) streamgaging network and includes 223,022 records of USGS ADCP discharge measurements. A second data set of river surface slope and discharge time-series was developed from paired upstream-downstream continuous monitoring stations to examine slope-discharge correlations. This data set (titled “2_slope”) was compiled from 15-minute stage-discharge measurements hosted on the USGS National Water Information System. The two input data sets used to derive correlation strength and coefficients among all variables are presented here in the two zipped comma-separated value (CSV) files found below and the XML file (titled “SitingConsiderations_Landing”) provides column definitions. Note: due to the size of the slope-discharge CSV, an alternative to Excel must be used to access the data such as R, Python, JMP, Notepad++ or similar reader.