Abstract. The Mediterranean region is characterized by intense
rainfall events giving rise to devastating floods. In Maghreb countries such
as Morocco, there is a strong need for forecasting systems to reduce the
impacts of floods. The development of such a system in the case of ungauged
catchments is complicated, but remote-sensing products could overcome the
lack of in situ measurements. The soil moisture content can strongly
modulate the magnitude of flood events and consequently is a crucial
parameter to take into account for flood modeling. In this study, different
soil moisture products (European Space Agency Climate Change Initiative, ESA-CCI; Soil Moisture and Ocean Salinity, SMOS; Soil Moisture and Ocean Salinity by the Institut National de la Recherche Agronomique and Centre d'Etudes Spatiales de la Biosphère, SMOS-IC; Advanced Scatterometer, ASCAT; and
ERA5 reanalysis) are compared to in situ measurements and one continuous
soil-moisture-accounting (SMA) model for basins located in the High Atlas
Mountains, upstream of the city of Marrakech. The results show that the
SMOS-IC satellite product and the ERA5 reanalysis are best correlated with
observed soil moisture and with the SMA model outputs. The different soil
moisture datasets were also compared to estimate the initial soil moisture
condition for an event-based hydrological model based on the Soil
Conservation Service curve number (SCS-CN). The ASCAT, SMOS-IC, and ERA5
products performed equally well in validation to simulate floods,
outperforming daily in situ soil moisture measurements that may not be
representative of the whole catchment soil moisture conditions. The results
also indicated that the daily time step may not fully represent the
saturation state before a flood event due to the rapid decay of soil
moisture after rainfall in these semiarid environments. Indeed, at the
hourly time step, ERA5 and in situ measurements were found to better
represent the initial soil moisture conditions of the SCS-CN model by
comparison with the daily time step. The results of this work could be used
to implement efficient flood modeling and forecasting systems in semiarid
regions where soil moisture measurements are lacking.