High resolution mapping of inundation area in the Amazon basin from a combination of L-band passive microwave, optical and radar datasets

Abstract In this paper, we present a methodology to map inland water in tropical areas under dense vegetation at high spatial and temporal resolution using multi-source remote sensing data. A new inundation product (SWAF-HR) is presented. It is characterized by a high spatial resolution (30′, 1 km) and high temporal resolution (3 days). The SWAF-HR product is estimated over the Amazon basin for the 2010–2016 period. It is based on a downscaling procedure and the synergistic use of: (1) water surface fraction at coarse spatial resolution from an L-band passive microwave sensor (Soil Moisture and Ocean Salinity – SMOS), (2) Global Surface Water Occurrence from Landsat (GSWO) and (3) the Digital Elevation Model (DEM) Multi-Error-Removed-Improved-Terrain (MERIT) based on the Shuttle Radar Topography Mission (SRTM). Thanks to the high capability of L-band microwave emission to reveal surface water under all-weather conditions and beneath the vegetation, the inundated area extent estimated by the SWAF-HR product is always larger than GSWO estimates obtained by the optical sensor (Landsat). SWAF-HR data is compared to ESA CCI and IGBP land covers, two SAR images and flooded areas over the Purus basin computed by the MGB-IPH model simulation. The results show the coherence of spatial and temporal dynamics of the SWAF-HR data. We show that the flooded area of the Branco River floodplain in Roraima (Brazil) varies from 0.2 × 104 to 2.7 × 104 km2 whereas the extent of the Bolivian floodplain (Llanos de Moxos) inundation ranges between 0.8 × 104 and 8.1 × 104 km2 during 2010–2016. The flooded area in the Branco floodplain gradually decreased from 2010 to 2015 but in 2016, the flooded area has increased during the rainy season. During 2010–2016, the minimum of the inundated surface extent was reached during 2015–2016 reflecting to a drought event related to ENSO. The most important uncertainties of the DEM are located over tropical areas but this information is essential in the downscaling procedure. Therefore, we investigate the impact of the choice of the DEM for the downscaling procedure. It is found that the choice of the DEM introduces 5% of error in the instantaneous water surface extent estimate but can reach up to 10% in the flood probability estimations over seven years. This new SWAF-HR product will be helpful for the understanding of the water, carbon and biogeochemical cycles of the Amazon.

[1]  L. Hess,et al.  Outgassing from Amazonian rivers and wetlands as a large tropical source of atmospheric CO2 , 2002, Nature.

[2]  Kwanchai Pakoksung,et al.  Digital elevation models on accuracy validation and bias correction in vertical , 2016, Modeling Earth Systems and Environment.

[3]  S. Kanae,et al.  Global Hydrological Cycles and World Water Resources , 2006, Science.

[4]  J. Espinoza,et al.  Climate variability and extreme drought in the upper Solimões River (western Amazon Basin): Understanding the exceptional 2010 drought , 2011 .

[5]  David A. Seal,et al.  The Shuttle Radar Topography Mission , 2007 .

[6]  L. Hess,et al.  Remote Sensing of the Distribution and Extent of Wetlands in the Amazon Basin , 2010 .

[7]  F. Aires,et al.  Surface freshwater storage and variability in the Amazon basin from multi‐satellite observations, 1993–2007 , 2013 .

[8]  S. Kanae,et al.  A high‐accuracy map of global terrain elevations , 2017 .

[9]  A. Cazenave,et al.  Floodplain water storage in the Negro River basin estimated from microwave remote sensing of inundation area and water levels , 2005 .

[10]  Yun Chen,et al.  The Strengths and Limitations in Using the Daily MODIS Open Water Likelihood Algorithm for Identifying Flood Events , 2014, Remote. Sens..

[11]  D. Lettenmaier,et al.  Measuring surface water from space , 2004 .

[12]  Filipe Aires,et al.  Comparisons of Global Terrestrial Surface Water Datasets over 15 Years , 2017 .

[13]  C. Barbosa,et al.  Dual-season mapping of wetland inundation and vegetation for the central Amazon basin , 2003 .

[14]  J. Marengo,et al.  The drought of 2010 in the context of historical droughts in the Amazon region , 2011 .

[15]  C. Jones,et al.  Projections of climate change effects on discharge and inundation in the Amazon basin , 2016, Climatic Change.

[16]  F. Aires,et al.  Interannual variability of surface water extent at the global scale, 1993–2004 , 2010 .

[17]  Carsten Brockmann,et al.  Consistent Global Land Cover Maps For Climate Modelling Communities: Current Achievements Of The ESA' Land Cover CCI , 2013 .

[18]  Walter Collischonn,et al.  MGB-IPH model for hydrological and hydraulic simulation of large floodplain river systems coupled with open source GIS , 2017, Environ. Model. Softw..

[19]  Luc Bourrel,et al.  The dynamics of floods in the Bolivian Amazon Basin , 2009 .

[20]  David P. Roy,et al.  Wetland mapping in the Congo Basin using optical and radar remotely sensed data and derived topographical indices , 2010 .

[21]  Filipe Aires,et al.  Remote sensing of global wetland dynamics with multiple satellite data sets , 2001 .

[22]  John M. Melack,et al.  Water level changes in a large Amazon lake measured with spaceborne radar interferometry and altimetry , 2001 .

[23]  F. O'Loughlin,et al.  A multi-sensor approach towards a global vegetation corrected SRTM DEM product , 2016 .

[24]  E. Novo,et al.  Responses of aquatic macrophyte cover and productivity to flooding variability on the Amazon floodplain , 2013, Global change biology.

[25]  C. Prigent,et al.  Surface freshwater storage and dynamics in the Amazon basin during the 2005 exceptional drought , 2012 .

[26]  Damien Sulla-Menashe,et al.  MODIS Collection 5 global land cover: Algorithm refinements and characterization of new datasets , 2010 .

[27]  Yann Kerr,et al.  Soil moisture retrieval from space: the Soil Moisture and Ocean Salinity (SMOS) mission , 2001, IEEE Trans. Geosci. Remote. Sens..

[28]  Frédéric Frappart,et al.  Changes in terrestrial water storage versus rainfall and discharges in the Amazon basin , 2013 .

[29]  Bhaskar J. Choudhury,et al.  Passive microwave remote sensing contribution to hydrological variables , 1991 .

[30]  S. Hamilton,et al.  Comparison of inundation patterns among major South American floodplains , 2002 .

[31]  J. Pekel,et al.  High-resolution mapping of global surface water and its long-term changes , 2016, Nature.

[32]  Ilana Wainer,et al.  Onset and End of the Rainy Season in the Brazilian Amazon Basin , 2001 .

[33]  P. Döll,et al.  Development and validation of a global database of lakes, reservoirs and wetlands , 2004 .

[34]  Lisa-Maria Rebelo,et al.  Development of a global inundation map at high spatial resolution from topographic downscaling of coarse-scale remote sensing data , 2015 .

[35]  W. Junk,et al.  Surface water quality and deforestation of the Purus river basin, Brazilian Amazon , 2017, International Aquatic Research.

[36]  W. Collischonn,et al.  The MGB-IPH model for large-scale rainfall—runoff modelling , 2007 .

[37]  Kyle McDonald,et al.  Development and Evaluation of a Multi-Year Fractional Surface Water Data Set Derived from Active/Passive Microwave Remote Sensing Data , 2015, Remote. Sens..

[38]  S. Calmant,et al.  Large‐scale hydrologic and hydrodynamic modeling of the Amazon River basin , 2013 .

[39]  W. Junk.  General aspects of floodplain ecology with special reference to Amazonian floodplains , 1997 .

[40]  B. Choudhury.  Monitoring global land surface using Nimbus-7 37 GHz data - Theory and examples , 1989 .

[41]  John M. Melack,et al.  An organic carbon budget for an Amazon floodplain lake , 2009 .

[42]  R. Paiva,et al.  Large scale hydrologic and hydrodynamic modeling using limited data and a GIS based approach , 2011 .

[43]  Frédéric Frappart,et al.  Variations of surface water extent and water storage in large river basins: A comparison of different global data sources , 2008 .

[44]  J. Marengo,et al.  Extreme seasonal droughts and floods in Amazonia: causes, trends and impacts , 2015 .

[45]  F. Aires,et al.  Global inundation dynamics inferred from multiple satellite observations, 1993–2000 , 2007 .

[46]  Josyane Ronchail,et al.  The extreme 2014 flood in south-western Amazon basin: the role of tropical-subtropical South Atlantic SST gradient , 2014 .

[47]  W. Junk,et al.  Freshwater fishes of the Amazon River basin: their biodiversity, fisheries, and habitats , 2007 .

[48]  P. Bates,et al.  A simple inertial formulation of the shallow water equations for efficient two-dimensional flood inundation modelling. , 2010 .

[49]  A. Al Bitar,et al.  The global SMOS Level 3 daily soil moisture and brightness temperature maps , 2017 .

[50]  Jung-Hyun Kim,et al.  Amazon River carbon dioxide outgassing fuelled by wetlands , 2013, Nature.

[51]  Frédérique Seyler,et al.  Amazon River discharge estimated from TOPEX/Poseidon altimetry , 2006 .

[52]  John D. Vona,et al.  Vegetation height estimation from Shuttle Radar Topography Mission and National Elevation Datasets , 2004 .

[53]  David J. Harding,et al.  Evaluation of the Global Multi-Resolution Terrain Elevation Data 2010 (GMTED2010) using ICESat geodetic control , 2011, International Symposium on Lidar and Radar Mapping Technologies.

[54]  José A. Sobrino,et al.  Record-breaking warming and extreme drought in the Amazon rainforest during the course of El Niño 2015–2016 , 2016, Scientific Reports.

[55]  C. Barbosa,et al.  Wetlands of the Lowland Amazon Basin: Extent, Vegetative Cover, and Dual-season Inundated Area as Mapped with JERS-1 Synthetic Aperture Radar , 2015, Wetlands.

[56]  Michael Dixon,et al.  Google Earth Engine: Planetary-scale geospatial analysis for everyone , 2017 .

[57]  F. Aires,et al.  Comparison of visible and multi-satellite global inundation datasets at high-spatial resolution , 2018, Remote Sensing of Environment.

[58]  K. Jones.  A comparison of algorithms used to compute hill slope as a property of the DEM , 1998 .

[59]  Frédéric Frappart,et al.  The Major Floods in the Amazonas River and Tributaries (Western Amazon Basin) during the 1970–2012 Period: A Focus on the 2012 Flood , 2013 .

[60]  A. S. Diegues.  An inventory of Brazilian wetlands , 1994 .

[61]  A. Al Bitar,et al.  Mapping Dynamic Water Fraction under the Tropical Rain Forests of the Amazonian Basin from SMOS Brightness Temperatures , 2017 .

[62]  S. Calmant,et al.  Toward continental hydrologic–hydrodynamic modeling in South America , 2018, Hydrology and Earth System Sciences.

[63]  John M. Melack,et al.  The importance of forest cover for fish richness and abundance on the Amazon floodplain , 2014, Hydrobiologia.

[64]  John M. Melack,et al.  Seasonal water storage on the Amazon floodplain measured from satellites , 2010 .

[65]  C. Nobre,et al.  Extreme climatic events in the Amazon basin , 2011, Theoretical and Applied Climatology.

[66]  Filipe Aires,et al.  A Long-Term, High-Resolution Wetland Dataset over the Amazon Basin, Downscaled from a Multiwavelength Retrieval Using SAR Data , 2013 .

[67]  Filipe Aires,et al.  Characterization and Space-Time Downscaling of the Inundation Extent over the Inner Niger Delta Using GIEMS and MODIS Data , 2014 .

[68]  S. Hamilton,et al.  Seasonal inundation patterns in two large savanna floodplains of South America: the Llanos de Moxos (Bolivia) and the Llanos del Orinoco (Venezuela and Colombia) , 2004 .

[69]  Carl F. Nordin,et al.  Water Discharge and Suspended Sediment Concentrations in the Amazon River: 1982–1984 , 1986 .

[70]  Dean B. Gesch,et al.  New land surface digital elevation model covers the Earth , 1999 .

[71]  J. Tomasella,et al.  Extreme flood events in the Bolivian Amazon wetlands , 2016 .

[72]  C. Nobre,et al.  The Drought of Amazonia in 2005 , 2008 .

[73]  Simone M. S. Costa,et al.  Climate diagnostics of three major drought events in the Amazon and illustrations of their seasonal precipitation predictions , 2012 .

[74]  S. Saatchi,et al.  The Global Rain Forest Mapping project - A review , 2000 .

[75]  W. Junk,et al.  The Amazon River basin , 2005 .

[76]  C. Justice,et al.  High-Resolution Global Maps of 21st-Century Forest Cover Change , 2013, Science.

[77]  B. Forsberg,et al.  Spatial patterns of hydrology, geomorphology, and vegetation on the floodplain of the Amazon River in Brazil from a remote sensing perspective , 1995 .