Scalable Water Balances from Earth Observations (SWEO): results from 50 years of remote sensing in hydrology

ABSTRACT

Strategic planning of water management at the river-basin scale requires (1) measurement and accounting of individual hydrological processes, (2) quantification of water resources, and (3) their optimal allocation. Scalable Water Balances from Earth Observations (SWEO) is an open-access parameterization enabling automated reporting of water footprints and Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) indicators. We present its systematic arrangement and input datasets, and demonstrate its accuracy by independent riverflow measurements. We also review some achievements in remote sensing for hydrology during the last 50 years in quantifying hydrological and water management processes, flows, fluxes and changes in storage from various independent sources; and append mathematical formulations.

KEYWORDS:

• 50 years of remote sensing hydrology
• rapid water accounting
• scalable water balance
• open-access Earth observation databases
• internal calibration

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Supplementary material

Supplementary data for this article can be accessed at https://doi.org/10.1080/02508060.2022.2117896