Investigating the Accuracy of Satellite Images in the Simulation of Runoff Caused by Snow Melting in the Balikhli Chai Catchment Area

A large part of the annual precipitation of the Balikhli Chai catchment falls in the form of snow, so knowing the snow cover and runoff resulting from snow melting in this area will be a great help to the planners of the water and agriculture sectors. The goals of this study include extracting the snow cover in the Balikhli Chai catchment using different satellite images and remote sensing technology; estimating the runoff caused by snow melting in the Balikhli Chai catchment using the results of satellite images and the WinSRM model; comparing and evaluating the result of different satellite images in the estimation of runoff caused by snow melting. In this study, first, the snow cover level was extracted using MODIS, NOAA, and Landsat sensors in the studied basin in the later years of 2016–2017 and 2017–2018. To extract the snow cover level, after downloading the images of all three sensors from the NASA website, atmospheric and radiometric corrections are made in ENVI software, and the snow cover area for the study area is obtained using the corrected images and ArcGIS software. Then, the runoff caused by snow melting is estimated. For this purpose, the WinSRM rainfall-runoff model is used in this study. The runoff caused by snow melting has been investigated by three sensors, MODIS, NOAA, and Landsat. The calibrated parameters in the WinSRM model for all three sensors provided acceptable answers for the coefficient of determination and the percentage of the difference between the measured and simulated total runoff. The runoff due to snow melting obtained in the SRM-MODIS model is more consistent with the observed runoff, and also the runoff obtained from the SRM-Landsat model shows a good match with the observed runoff with a very small difference compared to the SRM-MODIS model. The runoff obtained from the SRM-NOAA model has the least agreement with the observational data.