The last two decades have seen a sharp rise in the wealth of data provided by remote sensing platforms both airborne and space-borne. The number of studies demonstrating the support these data can offer in hydrological and hydraulic model building, understanding and improving model structures and increase model accuracy is growing rapidly. Research has been carried out in both rural and urban environments and at different scales showing the great benefits of remote sensing observations to hydrological sciences and applications. A number of studies have also highlighted the need for a satellite mission dedicated to the global observation of the continental water surface fluxes and storage, which, currently, does not exist. The proposed Surface Water and Ocean Topography mission, an ocean/hydrology satellite mission being jointly developed by NASA and CNES, with a launch date proposed for 2020, could fill this gap. SWOT will be designed to observe water surface elevation (and derived variables) over landmasses with a global coverage. The Ka-band SAR interferometer on SWOT will observe all rivers with widths above 100 m (with a 50m target) and all water bodies with an area above 250m x 250m, with cm vertical accuracy over a 1km2 area.

The objective of this session is to present and discuss research work that attempts to unlock the full potential of data from current remote sensing platforms and the future SWOT mission for improving flood inundation models in hydrology and increasing our understanding of hydrological and hydrodynamic processes in both rural and urban areas, and water resources management in general.

In brief, this session will present papers on:

- Calibration and evaluation of models dealing with hydrology/hydraulics
- Assimilation in models
- Building models
- Improving model structures
- Monitoring and modelling floods in urban water systems
- Mapping flood extent in urban areas using remote sensing data
- Modelling inundation processes in urban areas
- Urban flood management

More specifically for SWOT, papers should:

- Explore expected improvements from the use of SWOT data hydrology at global and regional scales
- Estimate water volume change and river discharge from this type of observations (either directly or through data assimilation)
- Use synthetic SWOT observations in hydrologic/hydraulic modelling (e.g. calibration)
- Investigate the sources of errors and potential solutions to mitigate their effects
- Cover any range of applications which could benefit from SWOT data