Abstract
Rivers and lakes are intrinsically connected waterbodies yet they are
rarely used to hydrologically constrain one another with remote sensing.
Here we begin to bridge the gap between river and lake hydrology with
the introduction of the LakeFlow algorithm. LakeFlow uses river-lake
mass conservation and observations from the Surface Water and Ocean
Topography (SWOT) satellite to provide river discharge estimates of lake
and reservoir inflows and outflows. We test LakeFlow performance at
three lakes using a synthetic SWOT dataset containing the maximum
measurement errors defined by the mission science requirements, and we
include modeled lateral inflow and lake evaporation data to further
constrain the mass balance. We find that LakeFlow produces promising
discharge estimates (median Nash-Sutcliffe efficiency=0.88, relative
bias=14%). LakeFlow can inform water resources management by providing
global lake inflow and outflow estimates, highlighting a path for
recognizing rivers and lakes as an interconnected system.