We present herein a new basis for measuring river discharge in ungauged catchments. Surrogate runoff (SR) is created using remotely sensed data to compensate for the absence of ground streamflow measurements. Because of their widespread availability, remotely sensed SR products are attractive, with approaches such as satellite-derived measurement-calibration ratio (C/M ratio). However, the use of the C/M ratio suffers from its limited penetration through ground vegetation canopies. While a microwave signal with a longer wavelength has been used to enhance the penetration capability, the coarseness of the spatial resolution of the microwave signal offsets its improvement due to the inherent assumptions in the C/M ratio, i.e., selecting two contrasting pixels (i.e., measurement and calibration) at the same time. To address both issues, this study proposes a new SR formulation using a longer wavelength (L-band microwave) with a better assumption for handling coarse grids, whereby the temporal variability of dryness against the driest state in each grid is used. The performance of the new SR is assessed for 467 Australian Hydrologic Reference Station catchments. Results show considerable improvements in the Pearson linear correlation (R) between the proposed SR and streamflow: 44% of the study areas show R higher than 0.4 with the new approach, whereas only 13% of the study areas show R higher than 0.4 with the currently used alternative (C/M ratio derived from Ka-band microwave). Overall, the resulting SR is dramatically improved by using the newly designed SR approach with the L-band microwave signal.