Abstract
Abstract. Lakes are important sources of freshwater and provide essential ecosystem services. Monitoring their spatial and temporal variability, and their functions, is an important task within the development of sustainable water management strategies. The Surface Water and Ocean Topography (SWOT) mission will provide continuous information on the dynamics of continental (rivers, lakes, wetlands and reservoirs) and ocean water bodies. This work aims to contribute to the international effort evaluating the SWOT satellite (2022 launch) performance for water balance assessment over large lakes (e.g., >100 km2). For this purpose, a hydrodynamic model was set up over Mamawi Lake, Canada, and different wind scenarios on lake hydrodynamics were simulated. The derived water surface elevations (WSEs) were compared to synthetic elevations produced by the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) SWOT high resolution (SWOT-HR) simulator. Moreover, water storages and net flows were retrieved from different possible SWOT orbital configurations and synthetic gauge measurements. In general, a good agreement was found between the WSE simulated from the model and those mimicked by the SWOT-HR simulator. Depending on the wind scenario, errors ranged between approximately −2 and 5 cm for mean error and from 30 to 70 cm root mean square error. Low spatial coverage of the lake was found to generate important biases in the retrievals of water volume or net flow between two satellite passes in the presence of local heterogeneities in WSE. However, the precision of retrievals was found to increase as spatial coverage increases, becoming more reliable than the retrievals from three synthetic gauges when spatial coverage approaches 100 %, demonstrating the capabilities of the future SWOT mission in monitoring dynamic WSE for large lakes across Canada.
Highlights
IntroductionInland freshwater systems (e.g., rivers, lakes, ponds and wetlands) are important sources for society and provide essential habitat to sustain biodiversity and valuable ecosystem services (e.g., Palmer et al, 2015)
Inland freshwater systems are important sources for society and provide essential habitat to sustain biodiversity and valuable ecosystem services (e.g., Palmer et al, 2015)
The study, one of several ongoing Surface Water and Ocean Topography (SWOT)-C TH (Pietroniro et al, 2019), compared water heights computed by the SWOTHR hydrology simulator with those provided by the H2D2 hydrodynamic model under various wind scenarios
Summary
Inland freshwater systems (e.g., rivers, lakes, ponds and wetlands) are important sources for society and provide essential habitat to sustain biodiversity and valuable ecosystem services (e.g., Palmer et al, 2015). As stated in previous studies, the available network of gauges is spatially insufficient for the surveillance of global rivers and lakes (e.g., Pavelsky et al, 2014) Densifying this ground-based monitoring system would be costly and challenging to install and maintain in difficult-to-access areas due their remote location and/or in zones affected by political or other conflicts (wars and internationally shared water bodies; e.g., Gleason and Hamdan, 2017). The estimation of other important hydrological variables such as water level, discharge, water volume and their variations can represent a more difficult challenge (Grippa et al, 2019) This challenge has been addressed by exploiting information acquired by radar and laser altimetry (e.g., Maheu et al, 2003; Crétaux and Birkett, 2006).
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