Review of scientific literature on the use of globally available remote sensed data products for distributed hydrological modelling.

To assess the capability of globally available satellite or remote sensed data products (GASRSDP) for distributed hydrological modelling and expedite their widespread uptake require a comprehensive knowledge-base related to their efficiency, temporal and spatial specifications and extents. Moreover, it is important to assess their performance in setting up hydrological models, their use as forcing data of models or for calibration, validation or evaluation of the model itself, along with an assessment of their limitation.

Hydrological models are the key tools for sustainable water management decision-making process. In order to capture the spatio-temporal variation in hydrological fluxes, the input data and representation of physical parameters in hydrological models plays an important role in their credibility. Models require rich amounts of data, which is mostly not readily available in data scare regions. The remotely sensed or satellite derived globally available data products are a vast and rich source of data with continuous addition to daily inventory. This data is widely in use for setting up hydrological models, their calibration, validation, evaluation and improvement.

Each day new data products are being released by different agencies. The scientific community is continuously mentioning the use of these data products in scientific articles. Present article does a systematic literature review of the articles over the last 5 years (2016 to 2021) in order to analyse the use of remote sensed / satellite globally available data products for detailed distributed hydrological modelling so that the progress in this context can be ascertain and future directions can be established. The review process was started by sourcing 179 articles from Scopus and 206 articles from Web of Science. After excluding the common and out of scope articles, the full analysis has been performed on about 100 articles. We conclude that the use of GASRSDP for the hydrological modelling of macro-scaled catchments has extensively explored and their performance is being evaluated by many authors while their worth for setting up physically based distributed hydrological model for catchment at meso-scale still need exploration, evaluation and assessments.