Estimation of River discharge using Very High-Resolution Satellite Data in Yangtze River

The measurement of river discharge is among the most fundamental observations and is necessary for understanding many water-related issues, such as flooding hazards, sediment transportation, and nutrient movement. Traditionally river discharge is estimated by measuring the water stage and converting the measurement to discharge using a stage-discharge rating curve. The possibility of monitoring river discharge from satellites has been largely ignored, because it is difficult to measure water surface information from space with sufficient precision. In this paper, an efficient approach to discharge estimation using mainly satellite data is developed and described. The proposed method, which focuses on the measurement of water-surface width coupled with river width-stage and stage-discharge relationships, is applied to the Yangtze River with good results.