Monitoring of the water-area variations of Lake Dongting in China with ENVISAT ASAR images

Abstract As an active microwave remote sensing sensor, synthetic aperture radar (SAR) can image the Earth surface with high spatial resolution in both day and night under all weather conditions. In this paper, a digital image processing technique was implemented to extract water area information from SAR images and the result is used to monitor the water area variation of Lake Dongting, the second largest freshwater lake in China. 8-year time series of European Space Agency's ENVISAT ASAR (Advanced Synthetic Aperture Radar) images acquired between 2002 and 2009 were obtained and a land-water classification scheme was implemented. Using independent in situ water level data measured at a lake-side hydrologic station during study period, we derived the relationship between water level and water area of Lake Dongting. The results show that, (1) during dry seasons, the water area is 518 km2 larger than that in the 1990s reported by Yangtze BHYRWRC (Bureau of Hydrology and Yangtze River Water Resources Commission), 2000 ; (2) the water area of Lake Dongting increased significantly in the 2000s after the Chinese Government's “return land to lake” policy took effect in 1998; (3) the water level of Lake Dongting could be low during a rainy season due to drought; but could be high in a dry season due to discharges from the upstream Three Gorges Dam. In addition, the relationship between water storage change and water area/level change is obtained.

[1]  H. Liu,et al.  Automated extraction of coastline from satellite imagery by integrating Canny edge detection and locally adaptive thresholding methods , 2004 .

[2]  Elmar Csaplovics,et al.  Flood monitoring in a semi-arid environment using spatially high resolution radar and optical data. , 2009, Journal of environmental management.

[3]  Xavier Descombes,et al.  Coastline detection by a Markovian segmentation on SAR images , 1996, Signal Process..

[4]  Jiang Chang,et al.  The hydrological effect between Jingjiang River and Dongting Lake during the initial period of Three Gorges Project operation , 2010 .

[5]  David C. Mason,et al.  Accurate and efficient determination of the shoreline in ERS-1 SAR images , 1996, IEEE Trans. Geosci. Remote. Sens..

[6]  L. Smith.  Satellite remote sensing of river inundation area, stage, and discharge: a review , 1997 .

[7]  D. Mason,et al.  Flood boundary delineation from Synthetic Aperture Radar imagery using a statistical active contour model , 2001 .

[8]  Carlos Lopez-Martinez,et al.  ASAR polarimetric, multi-incidence angle and multitemporal characterization of Doñana wetlands for flood extent monitoring , 2010 .

[9]  Laurence C. Smith,et al.  Remote sensing of volumetric storage changes in lakes , 2009 .

[10]  Chenghu Zhou,et al.  Flood monitoring using multi-temporal AVHRR and RADARSAT imagery , 2000 .

[11]  S. T. Acton,et al.  Automated delineation of coastline from polarimetric SAR imagery , 2004 .

[12]  Andreas Niedermeier,et al.  Detection of coastlines in SAR images using wavelet methods , 2000, IEEE Trans. Geosci. Remote. Sens..

[13]  Seiji Hayashi,et al.  Using NOAA AVHRR Data to Assess Flood Damage in China , 2003, Environmental monitoring and assessment.

[14]  W. Cleveland.  Robust Locally Weighted Regression and Smoothing Scatterplots , 1979 .

[15]  R. C. Thomas,et al.  Computer Vision: A First Course , 1988 .

[16]  Seiji Hayashi,et al.  Measuring Water Storage Fluctuations in Lake Dongting, China, by Topex/Poseidon Satellite Altimetry , 2006, Environmental monitoring and assessment.

[17]  Margarida Silveira,et al.  Separation Between Water and Land in SAR Images Using Region-Based Level Sets , 2009, IEEE Geoscience and Remote Sensing Letters.

[18]  Robert G. Bryant,et al.  Investigation of flood inundation on playas within the Zone of Chotts, using a time-series of AVHRR , 2002 .

[19]  Jong-Sen Lee,et al.  Coastline Detection And Tracing In SAr Images , 1990 .

[20]  C. Prigent,et al.  Inundated wetland dynamics over boreal regions from remote sensing: the use of Topex‐Poseidon dual‐frequency radar altimeter observations , 2006 .