Hydrological Evaluation of TRMM Rainfall over the Upper Senegal River Basin

The availability of climatic data, especially on a daily time step, has become very rare in West Africa over the last few years due to the high costs of climate data monitoring. This scarcity of climatic data is a huge obstacle to conduct hydrological studies over some watersheds. In this context, our study aimed to evaluate the capacity of Tropical Rainfall Measuring Mission (TRMM) satellite data to simulate the observed runoffs over the Bafing (the main important tributary of the Senegal River) before their potential integration in hydrological studies. The conceptual hydrological model GR4J (modèle du Génie Rural (Agricultural Engineering Model) à 4 paramètres Journalier (4 parameters Daily)) has been used, calibrated and validated over the 1961–1997 period with rainfall and Potential Evapotranspiration (PET) as inputs. Then, the parameters that best reflect the rainfall-runoff relation, obtained during the cross-calibration-validation phase, were used to simulate runoff over the 1998–2004 period using observed and TRMM rainfalls. The findings of this study show that there is a high consistency between satellite-based estimates and ground-based observations of rainfall. Over the 1998–2004 simulation period, the two rainfall data series show quite satisfactorily results. The output hydrographs from satellite-based estimates and ground-based observations of rainfall coincide quite well with the shape of observed hydrographs with Nash-Sutcliffe Efficiency coefficient (NSE) of 0.88 and 0.80 for observed rainfalls and TRMM rainfalls, respectively.