Hydraulic model calibration by using satellite altimetry: comparison of different products

Monitoring of freshwater represents the base for development and management of global water resources. However, the high cost related to the set-up and maintenance of traditional monitoring networks makes the density of observed data very limited, or even absent, in vast parts of the globe. On the contrary, the last decades have seen a great evolution on the capability to acquire remotely sensed observations, providing an increasing availability of spatially distributed data to be used for monitoring inland water. In this study, using data collected by different satellite missions (i.e., ENVISAT, ENVISAT XT, TOPEX/Poseidon and SARAL/Altika), we investigate the usefulness of remotely sensed water surface elevation for the calibration of a hydraulic model implemented for the middle-lower portion of the Po River. We compare the performance and the accuracy of different satellite altimetry products assessing whether their integration can improve the calibration accuracy and reduce the overall model uncertainty.