Accurate and detailed information on lake/reservoir water levels and temporal changes around the globe is urgently required for water resource management and related studies. The traditional satellite radar altimeters normally monitor water level changes of large lakes and reservoirs (i.e., greater than 1 km2) around the world. Fortunately, the recent Ice, Cloud, and land Elevation Satellite-2 (ICESat-2) makes it possible to monitor water level changes for some small lakes and reservoirs (i.e., less than 1 km2). ICESat-2 ATL13 products provide observations of inland water surface heights, which are suitable for water level estimation at a global scale. In this study, ICESat-2 ATL13 products were used to conduct a global estimation and assessment of lake/reservoir water level changes. We produced monthly water levels for 13,843 lakes and reservoirs with areas greater than 0.1 km2 and all-season ATL13 products across the globe, in which 2257 targets are smaller than 1 km2. In total, the average valid number of months covered by ICESat-2 is 5.41 months and only 204 of 13,843 lakes and reservoirs have water levels in all the months in 2019. In situ water level data from 21 gauge stations across the United States and 12 gauge stations across Australia were collected to assess the monthly lake/reservoir water levels, which exhibited a high accuracy (RMSE = 0.08 m, r = 0.999). According to comparisons between the monthly water levels and changes from ATL08 products in another study and ATL13 products in this study, we found that both products can accurately estimate the monthly water level of lakes and reservoirs, but water levels derived from ATL13 products exhibited a higher accuracy compared with water levels derived from ATL08 products (RMSE = 0.28 m, r = 0.999). In general, the ATL13 product is more convenient because the HydroLAKES mask of inland water bodies, the orthometric height (with respect to the EGM2008 geoid) of water surfaces, and several data quality parameters specific to water surfaces were involved in the ATL13 product.
Monitoring global lake/reservoir water level changes is needed to understand the global water cycle and investigate its potential drivers. The existing global water level products only cover lakes/reservoirs with large sizes (> 100 km2). Here, ICESat and ICESat-2 altimetry data with small footprints are employed to examine global water level changes for 22,008 lakes/reservoirs greater than 1 km2. We report that 77.56% of them exhibited rising water levels over 2003-2021. Across the globe, 78.84% of lakes exhibit a rising water level, while the proportion for reservoirs is only 56.01%. Global lake/reservoir is estimated to experience a median water level change rate of +0.02±0.02 m/year over 2003-2021, and lakes have a larger water level rise (+0.02±0.02 m/year) than reservoirs (+0.008±0.14 m/year). We detect large-scale rising water levels in the Tibetan Plateau, the Mississippi River basin, and high-latitude regions of the Northern Hemisphere. Our calculation also suggests a negative relationship between the percentage of water level rise in lakes/reservoirs and population density for global river basins (r = -0.41, p-value < 0.05) and eleven hotspots (r = -0.48, p-value < 0.05). Our result suggests that inland water level has tended to rise in recent years under natural processes while human activities (i.e., with higher population density) can balance the water level rise via reservoir regulation. We find the existing datasets underestimated global water level rise, which may be caused by the exclusion of numerous small lakes/reservoirs. Our estimated global water level change rates (that include numerous small lakes with areas of 1~10 km2) can improve the understanding of global hydrological cycle and water resource management under the double pressure of climate warming and human activities.
Near-shore bathymetry is a fundamental data set for planning marine engineering construction, developing hydrodynamic models, investigating coastal ecosystems, and other coastal applications (
The new spaceborne photon-counting lidar, i.e., ICESat-2, has shown great advantages in obtaining nearshore bathymetry at a global scale. The forward-scattering effect in the water column is one of the main error sources in airborne lidar bathymetry (ALB). However, the magnitude of the bathymetric bias for spaceborne lidars and how can we effectively correct this bias have not been evaluated and are very worthy of investigation. In this study, the forward-scattering effect on spaceborne photon-counting lidar bathymetry is quantitatively modeled and analyzed based on the semi-analytic Monte Carlo simulation method. Meanwhile, an empirical formula for correcting forward-scattering-induced bathymetric bias specific to ICESat-2 is derived. When the water depth exceeds 20 m, this bias cannot be neglected for ICESat-2 even in clear open ocean waters. In two study areas with local in situ measurements (St. Thomas and Hawaii), the bathymetric bias of ICESat-2 in deep waters (>20 m) is corrected from exceeding 50 cm to less than 13 cm using the proposed empirical formula. This study is valuable to evaluate and correct the forward-scattering-induced bias for the existing ICESat-2 and is also fundamental to optimizing the hardware parameters of a possible future photon-counting bathymetric lidar.
Chlorophyll-a concentration (chl-a) is a great indicator for estimating phytoplankton biomass and productivity levels and is also particularly useful for monitoring the water quality, biodiversity and species distribution, and harmful algal blooms. A great deal of studies investigated to estimate chl-a concentrations using ocean color remotely sensed data. With the development of photon-counting sensors, spaceborne photon-counting lidar can compensate for the shortcomings of passive optical remote sensing by enabling ocean vertical profiling in low-light conditions (e.g., at night). Using geolocated photons captured by the first spaceborne photon-counting lidar borne on ICESat-2 (Ice, Cloud, and Land Elevation Satellite-2), this research reported methods for deriving vertical profiles of chl-a concentration in the upper layer of ocean waters. This study first calculates the average numbers of backscattered subaqueous photons of ICESat-2 at different water depths, and then estimates the optical parameters in water column based on a discrete theoretical model of the expected number of received signal photons. With the estimated optical parameters, vertical profiles of chl-a concentration are calculated by two different empirical algorithms. In two study areas (mostly with Type I open ocean waters and small part of Type II coastal ocean waters), the derived chl-a concentrations are generally consistent when validated by BGC-Argo (Biogeochemical Argo) data in the vertical direction (MAPEs<15%) and compared with MODIS (Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer) data in the along-track direction (average R2>0.86). Using globally covered ICESat-2 data, this approach can be used to obtain vertical profiles of chl-a concentration and optical parameters at a larger scale, which will be helpful to analyze impact factors of climate change and human activities on subsurface phytoplankton species and their growth state.
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