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ARS Home » Northeast Area » Beltsville, Maryland (BARC) » Beltsville Agricultural Research Center » Hydrology and Remote Sensing Laboratory » Research » Publications at this Location » Publication #320361
Title: Comprehensive lake dynamics mapping at continental scales using Landsat 8

Author
item SHENG, YONGWEI - University Of California
item SONG, CHUNQIAN - University Of California
item WANG, JIDA - University Of California
item LYONS, EVAN - University Of California
item KNOX, BENJAMIN - University Of California
item COX, JOSHUA - University Of California
item Gao, Feng

Submitted to: Remote Sensing of Environment
Publication Type: Peer Reviewed Journal
Publication Acceptance Date: 12/30/2015
Publication Date: 1/13/2016
Publication URL: http://handle.nal.usda.gov/10113/61853
Citation: Sheng, Y., Song, C., Wang, J., Lyons, E., Knox, B., Cox, J., Gao, F.N. 2016. Comprehensive lake dynamics mapping at continental scales using Landsat 8. Remote Sensing of Environment. doi:10.1016/j.rse.2015.12.041.

Interpretive Summary: Inland lakes are critical components of global water cycles and are essential resources for human activities. Accurate distribution of inland lakes in time and space are required for water management. This paper presents the methodology and circa-2015 lake distributions using Landsat 8 imagery, in addition to the previous circa-2000 lake map from Landsat 7. The lake distribution at 30m spatial resolution is necessary for water use monitoring which is required by the National Agricultural Statistics Service and Foreign Agricultural Service for crop yield estimation.

Technical Abstract: Inland lakes, important water resources, play a crucial role in the global water cycle and are sensitive to global warming and human activities. There clearly is a pressing need to understand temporal and spatial variations of lakes at global and continental scales. The recent operation of Landsat 8 extends the unprecedented Landsat records to over 40 years, allowing long-term continental-scale lake dynamics mapping. Using the continental lake products derived from circa-2000 Landsat 7 images as a reference, this research maps circa-2015 lake distributions, extents, and dynamics using multi-temporal images acquired by Landsat 8 at continental scales. This paper describes the methodology developed mapping lake during lake stable seasons, and proposes an object-oriented lake composing scheme for representative lake map production from multi-temporal lake extents to reduce temporal variability in continental-scale lake product generation. Oceania contains a large group of salt lakes exhibiting high seasonal and inter-annual variability, has the most intensive image coverage during the first two year operation of Landsat 8, and provides a great case study in this research to demonstrate the effectiveness and efficiency of continental-scale lake dynamics mapping using Landsat 8.