Comment on essd-2021-278

doi:10.5194/essd-2021-278-rc2

Abstract

Abstract. Inland surface waters are abundant in the tundra and boreal forests of North America, essential to environments and human societies but vulnerable to climate changes. These high-latitude water bodies differ greatly in their morphological and topological characteristics related to the formation, type, and vulnerability. In this paper, we present a water body dataset for the North American high latitudes (WBD-NAHL). Nearly 6.5 million water bodies were identified, with approximately 6 million (â¼90â%) of them smaller than 0.1âkm2. The dataset provides area and morphological attributes for every water body. During this study, we developed an automated approach for detecting surface water extent and identifying water bodies in the 10âm resolution Sentinel-2 multispectral satellite data to enhance the capability of delineating small water bodies and their morphological attributes. The approach was applied to the Sentinel-2 data acquired in 2019 to produce the water body dataset for the entire tundra and boreal forests in North America. The dataset provided a more complete representation of the region than existing regional datasets for North America, e.g., Permafrost Region Pond and Lake (PeRL). The total accuracy of the detected water extent by the WBD-NAHL dataset was 96.36â% through comparison to interpreted data for locations randomly sampled across the region. Compared to the 30âm or coarser-resolution water datasets, e.g., JRC GSW yearly water history, HydroLakes, and Global Lakes and Wetlands Database (GLWD), the WBD-NAHL provided an improved ability on delineating water bodies and reported higher accuracies in the size, number, and perimeter attributes of water body by comparing to PeRL and interpreted regional dataset. This dataset is available from the National Tibetan Plateau/Third Pole Environment Data Center (TPDC; http://data.tpdc.ac.cn, last access: 6 June 2022): <a href="https://doi.org/10.11888/Hydro.tpdc.271021">https://doi.org/10.11888/Hydro.tpdc.271021</a> (Feng and Sui, 2020).

Highlights

Inland surface waters include various types of water bodies, including rivers and streams; large and small lakes; reservoirs; and ephemeral ponds
In this paper we present a higher resolution inland surface water body inventory (SWBI) for the tundra and boreal forests of
More than 6.65 million (6,652,015) surface water bodies were identified in the tundra and boreal forests of North America, while 90.4% of these water bodies (6,015,484) were smaller than 0.1 km2

Summary

Introduction

Inland surface waters include various types of water bodies, including rivers and streams; large and small lakes; reservoirs; and ephemeral ponds. The temperature of the Arctic, in particular, has risen twice as fast as the average global temperature (Graversen et al, 2008; Johannessen et al, 2004; Pachauri and Reisinger, 2007; Serreze and Francis, 2006;Li et al, 2020). This change in climate is driving changes in terrestrial ecosystems in the Arctic as well. High-latitude water bodies have started changing since the early 1970s (Carroll et al, 2011; Carroll and Loboda, 2017; Cooley et al, 2019; Smith et al, 2005; Fayne et al, 2020; Nitze et al, 2020).

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Conclusion