Impact of lake surface changes on climate fluctuation within a lake‐affected region

Abstract

Wetlands are one of the most important aquatic ecosystems that are vulnerable to various factors, including human activity or natural events such as drought. Remote sensing technology is an effective technique for managing and monitoring changes in these ecosystems caused by natural events and human activities. The present study evaluated the effects of changes at Bakhtegan Lake on six climatic parameters in its surrounding environments. Landsat satellite imagery was used to monitor changes in the Bakhtegan Lake surface during times of maximum extent in the period from 2000 to 2015. Support vector machine (SVM) classification was applied to extract the characteristics of the lake surface. Then, the distance of 80 km from the lakeshore was identified as the environment of its influence on the surrounding land, which was divided into three buffers from 0 to 25, 26–55 and 56–80 km. The results showed that a higher accuracy than the index for extracting lake area was achieved using the SVM classification method. Additionally, the climate parameters of mean annual precipitation, relative humidity, and percentage of cloud cover significantly influenced (0.001) lake surface changes in buffer one, indicating the highest impact among all climatic parameters. In buffer two, the significance level of the precipitation parameter decreased to about 0.05, and the annual mean minimum temperature was significantly lower (0.05); however, the mean annual minimum and maximum temperatures were not significant