The Integrated Precipitation and Hydrology Experiment. Part I: Quality High-Resolution Landscape Attributes Datasets.

Abstract

Quality-controlled datasets at high spatial and temporal resolution (1km×1km, hourly) for a five year period (2007-2011) were developed for the IPHEx-H4SE project (Integrated Precipitation and Hydrology Experiment – Hydrologic Applications for the Southeast US), to support a common platform for the intercomparison and evaluation of hydrological models using various QPE (Quantitative Precipitation Estimation) products in an operational setting in coordination with the Intense Observing Period of the IPHEx field campaign in April-July 2014 (IPHEX2014). The data sets span four major river basins in the Southeast US with headwaters in the Southern Appalachians: the Upper Tennessee, the Savannah, the Catawba-Sandee, and the Yadkin-Peedee. Quality control and post processing were conducted to correct and improve the hydrometeorological forcing data sets. In this manuscript, we present the procedures and methodology to develop land surface broadband albedo, broadband emissivity, leaf area index (LAI), and fractional vegetation coverage (CV) at high tempo-spatial resolution based on the MODIS (Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer) products. Quality control, gap filling and temporal filtering were performed to correct and improve the landscape attributes derived from MODIS products mainly due to cloud or snow or foggy contamination and limitations of retrieval algorithms. The datasets were utilized to specify land attributes in a distributed hydrological model (3D-LSHM) in the Pigeon River Basin, a headwater basin of one of the four major river basins in the Southeast of interest in the IPHEx-H4SE project. Results from fiveyear continuous simulations from 2007 to 2011 are used illustrate the importance of the quality landscape attributes affect the regional water partitioning at basin scale and thus the overall the hydrologic regime.