A dataset of the annual water bodies in wet seasons on the Mongolian Plateau during 1990–2021

Abstract

The Mongolian Plateau is characteristic of fragile ecosystem and serious land desertification. As one of the main climate-varied sensitive regions in Asia, it is of great value for the study on temporal and spatial changes of water resources. For the production of this dataset, we used Google Earth engine (GEE) platform to process the high–quality Landsat series satellite images available in the past 32 years (1990–2021). Using the minimum cloud amount synthesis algorithm, we obtained the minimum cloud amount images in the wet season (from June to September) of each year. After calculating NDWI, we further used the OTSU algorithm for threshold segmentation, and extracted the yearly water body data with 30m resolution on the Mongolian Plateau in the wet season for 32 years. The final data results are saved in GeoTIFF format. Through comparison, the average consistency between this dataset and the JRC annual water body data in both permanent water body and maximum water body is 93.0% and 90.9% respectively, which indicates the high reliability of this dataset. The dataset can provide data support for water resource changes, ecological construction planning, environmental protection, etc. on the Mongolian Plateau.