Estimating river discharge from very high‐resolution satellite data: a case study in the Yangtze River, China
Author(s) -
Xu Kaiqin,
Zhang Jiqun,
Watanabe Masataka,
Sun Chunpeng
Publication year - 2004
Publication title -
hydrological processes
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 1.222
H-Index - 161
eISSN - 1099-1085
pISSN - 0885-6087
DOI - 10.1002/hyp.1458
Subject(s) - rating curve , discharge , stage (stratigraphy) , yangtze river , hydrology (agriculture) , environmental science , satellite , remote sensing , water discharge , china , geology , drainage basin , geomorphology , geography , paleontology , cartography , geotechnical engineering , archaeology , engineering , aerospace engineering , sediment
Abstract The measurement of river discharge is necessary for understanding many water‐related issues. Traditionally, river discharge is estimated by measuring water stage and converting the measurement to discharge by using a stage–discharge rating curve. Our proposed method for the first time couples the measurement of water‐surface width with river width–stage and stage–discharge rating curves by using very high‐resolution satellite data. We used it to estimate the discharge in the Yangtze (Changjiang) River as a case study. The discharges estimated at four stations from five QuickBird‐2 images matched the ground observation data very well, demonstrating that the proposed approach can be regarded as ancillary to traditional field measurement methods or other remote methods to estimate river discharge. Copyright © 2004 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.