Retrieval of lake water temperature based on LandSat TM imagery: A case study in East Lake of Wuhan

Abstract

Lake water temperature is one of the most important parameters determining ecological conditions in lake water. With the recent development of satellite remote sensing, remotely sensed data instead of traditional sampling measurement can be used to retrieve the lake surface temperature. The East Lake located in the Wuhan city was selected as research region in this paper. The mono window algorithm has been applied to retrieve the lake water temperature of East lake basin with Landsat TM data. Through three groups of field survey data, the outcome shows that the retrieval results using the mono window model are quite approximate to the same period of the experimental region historical temperature data. So, it is feasible to utilize the remote sensing method to obtain the lake temperature. Meanwhile, the retrieval results also demonstrate that the East Lake surface temperatures from different years have the similar distribution regularity. Generally speaking, the temperature of the lake center is higher than the surrounding area. The west of lake is mostly higher than the east mainly due to the vegetation density and urbanization distribution condition. This conclusion is important to the further study on monitoring the East Lake temperature particularly in large scale.