Abstract
Of the approximately 6700 lakes and reservoirs larger than 1 km2 in the Contiguous United States (CONUS), only ~430 (~6%) are actively gaged by the United States Geological Survey (USGS) or their partners and are available for download through the National Water Information System database. Remote sensing analysis provides a means to fill in these data gaps in order to glean a better understanding of the spatiotemporal water level changes across the CONUS. This study takes advantage of two-plus years of NASA’s ICESat-2 (IS-2) ATLAS photon data (ATL03 products) in order to derive water level changes for ~6200 overlapping lakes and reservoirs (>1 km2) in the CONUS. Interactive visualizations of large spatial datasets are becoming more commonplace as data volumes for new Earth observing sensors have markedly increased in recent years. We present such a visualization created from an automated cluster computing workflow that utilizes tens of billions of ATLAS photons which derives water level changes for all of the overlapping lakes and reservoirs in the CONUS. Furthermore, users of this interactive website can download segmented and clustered IS-2 ATL03 photons for each individual waterbody so that they may run their own analysis. We examine ~19,000 IS-2 derived water level changes that are spatially and temporally coincident with water level changes from USGS gages and find high agreement with our results as compared to the in situ gage data. The mean squared error (MSE) and the mean absolute error (MAE) between these two products are 1 cm and 6 cm, respectively.
Highlights
Lakes and reservoirs provide an important water resource for human use
The results from all ~6000 lakes and reservoirs examined in this study are viewable via an online interactive website where an interested reader may better understand the spatiotemporal differences in water level changes at this scale
Selecting an individual lake allows the user to view the interactive water level change time series separated by track and beam type as well as the interactive daily data plots for each date in the time series
Summary
Lakes and reservoirs provide an important water resource for human use These resources range from recreational activities, power generation, drinking water, agricultural irrigation, or other commercial and industrial uses. Monitoring changes in lake and reservoir water levels are of a benefit to both local and regional water managers so that they may make more informed decisions about water management policies This is especially true at the continental scale where the spatiotemporal changes in water levels are notably diverse across the landscape [5,6]. To this end, continental scale monitoring of lake and reservoir water level changes is difficult to accomplish solely by the utilization of in situ water level gages.
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