HR: 1400h
AN: H33A-01    [Abstracts]
TI: Spatiotemporal Analysis of a Monsoon Flood Event in Northwestern Mexico: Insights from Remote Sensing and Hydrologic Modeling
AU: * Vivoni, E R
EM: vivoni@nmt.edu
AF: Department of Earth and Environmental Science, New Mexico Institute of Mining and Technology, 801 Leroy Place, Socorro, NM 87801, United States
AB: Hydrological processes in the North American Monsoon (NAM) region are poorly understood due to the strong seasonal signature of the precipitation forcing and land surface conditions, including vegetation state and soil moisture, occurring in the mountainous, semiarid landscape. Mechanistic understanding can be achieved through field observations of hydrologic states and fluxes, remote sensing of changing land surface conditions and numerical modeling of distributed hydrological processes. A particularly promising approach to identifying the salient mechanisms is through analysis of flood events occurring after intense mesoscale storms. In this study, we present an analysis of a monsoon flood event generated in the Río San Miguel watershed in northwestern Mexico using a variety of observational and modeling tools. We integrate data sets obtained from a hydrometeorological network, satellite-based precipitation forcing and aircraft-based soil moisture estimates. A distributed hydrologic model, known as the TIN-based Real-time Integrated Basin Simulator (tRIBS), is applied to the large basin utilizing the hydrological observations and regional topography, soils and vegetation data sets. We focus a portion of our analysis on reconstructing the flood event and understanding the causative factors through use of the numerical model. We gain further insight on the hydrological processes by comparing the spatial pattern of the basin response to remotely-sensed observations of precipitation, vegetation and soil moisture fields. We also assess the role played by antecedent soil moisture conditions on the flood response. Finally, we discuss some avenues for improvements in hydrological modeling of NAM basins characterized by complex terrain and seasonal land surface conditions.
DE: 1813 Eco-hydrology
DE: 1855 Remote sensing (1640)
DE: 1860 Streamflow
DE: 1866 Soil moisture
DE: 1878 Water/energy interactions (0495)
SC: Hydrology [H]
MN: 2007 Joint Assembly