Application of the SMAP monthly model to the Piauitinga river basin located in the State of Sergipe, Brazil

Abstract

The generation of flow data allows the assessment of the capacity to meet water demands, predict floods, and estimate the potential for hydraulic exploitation for electrical energy generation. In Brazil, precipitation data series, due to their ease of measurement, are more extensive compared to flow data series, enabling the use of hydrological models called rainfall-runoff models capable of estimating flows from precipitation data. Therefore, utilizing the Brazil Gridded Meteorological Data (BR-DWGD) database, this study aims to generate, calibrate, and validate flow data for the Piauitinga river basin located in the state of Sergipe, Brazil, using the monthly rainfall-runoff SMAP model. The soil parameters considered in the validation for the studied region showed a good fit to the observed data, achieving a Nash-Sutcliffe (NS) of 84% and log-Nash-Sutcliffe (NSLog) of 85% in calibration, and Nash-Sutcliffe (NS) of 70% and a log-Nash-Sutcliffe (NSLog) of 80% in validation. Therefore, since the rainfall-runoff model used exhibited good performance for the studied hydrographic basin, it becomes feasible to use the generated synthetic series to fill possible gaps in the historical series of monthly average flows.