Abstract
Satellite-derived lake surface water temperature (LSWT) measurements can be used for monitoring purposes. However, analyses based on the LSWT of Lake Ontario and the surrounding land surface temperature (LST) are scarce in the current literature. First, we provide an evaluation of the commonly used Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS)-derived LSWT/LST (MOD11A1 and MYD11A1) using in situ measurements near the area of where Lake Ontario, the St. Lawrence River and the Rideau Canal meet. The MODIS datasets agreed well with ground sites measurements from 2015–2017, with an R2 consistently over 0.90. Among the different ground measurement sites, the best results were achieved for Hill Island, with a correlation of 0.99 and centered root mean square difference (RMSD) of 0.73 K for Aqua/MYD nighttime. The validated MODIS datasets were used to analyze the temperature trend over the study area from 2001 to 2018, through a linear regression method with a Mann–Kendall test. A slight warming trend was found, with 95% confidence over the ground sites from 2003 to 2012 for the MYD11A1-Night datasets. The warming trend for the whole region, including both the lake and the land, was about 0.17 K year−1 for the MYD11A1 datasets during 2003–2012, whereas it was about 0.06 K year−1 during 2003–2018. There was also a spatial pattern of warming, but the trend for the lake region was not obviously different from that of the land region. For the monthly trends, the warming trends for September and October from 2013 to 2018 are much more apparent than those of other months.
Highlights
Lakes are always considered as effective and valid sentinels in relation to climate change
Air temperatures from six sites were first compared with Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) datasets from 2015 to 2017 (Figure 3)
There are a lot of scatter points off the y = x diagonal line in Figure 3a compared to Figure 3b, which indicates that the daytime MODIS lake surface water temperature (LSWT) had a lower correlation with ground air temperature than the nighttime MODIS LSWT
Summary
Lakes are always considered as effective and valid sentinels in relation to climate change. They can provide accurate indications for climate change analysis and its regulation [1,2,3,4,5]. Remote sensing-based observations have gained increasing popularity for analyzing LSWT and have been used as a good proxy indicators for studying the impact of climate change by providing spatial and temporal temperature observations on lake surfaces [6,8]. The 2013 Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and some researchers claimed that the world is in a warming hiatus [9,10,11]. Some researchers debated about whether the warming was on a “hiatus” or “slowed down” [14,15,16]
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