LakeSST: Lake Skin Surface Temperature in French inland water bodies for 1999–2016 from Landsat archives

Abstract

Abstract. The spatial and temporal coverage of the Landsat satellite imagery make it an ideal resource for the monitoring of water temperature over large territories at a moderate spatial and temporal scale at a low cost. We used Landsat 5 and Landsat 7 archive images to create the Lake Skin Surface Temperature (LakeSST) data set, which contains skin water surface temperature data for 442 French water bodies (natural lakes, reservoirs, ponds, gravel pit lakes and quarry lakes) for the period 1999-2016. We assessed the quality of the satellite temperature measurements by comparing them to in situ measurements and taking into account the cool skin and warm layer effects. To estimate these effects and to investigate the theoretical differences between the freshwater and seawater cases, we adapted the COARE 3.0 algorithm to the freshwater environment. We also estimated the warm layer effect using in situ data. At the reservoir of Bimont, the estimated cool skin effect was about −0.3 and −0.6 • C most of time, while the warm layer effect at 0.55 m was negligible on average, but could occasionally attain several degrees, and a cool layer was often observed in the night. The overall RMSE of the satellite-derived temperature measurements was about 1.2 • C, similar to other applications of satellite images to estimate freshwater surface temperatures. The LakeSST data can be used for studies on the temporal evolution of lake water temperature and for geographical studies of temperature patterns. The LakeSST data are available at https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.1193745.

An epilimnion and hypolimnion temperature model based on air temperature and lake characteristics

“…We obtained surface skin temperature data measured by Landsat 5 TM and Landsat 7 ETMþ for 1999-2016 from the data set LakeSST (Prats et al, 2018a). In usual conditions for water bodies, satellite-derived temperatures were available every 16 days for a given satellite.…”

“…Since Landsat 5 and Landsat 7 have identical orbits with a delay of 8 days, satellite images for a given water body could be obtained every 8 days when both satellites were active (Landsat 5 was decommissioned in 2013). This optimal periodicity of measurement was reduced because of the presence of clouds (Tolnai et al, 2016), water vapour content beyond the limit of applicability of the algorithm used to estimate surface temperatures (Prats et al, 2018a) or because of technical and cost limitations in the number of images that could be acquired (Goward et al, 2006;Wulder et al, 2016). The number of satellite images per water body varied between 6 and 205, although the median number was 59 (less than 4 images per year in average).…”

“…We used the median temperature for each date as an estimation of the average surface temperature. We corrected the seasonal bias b e following (Prats et al, 2018a):…”

“…Thanks to their advantages, satellite images have increasingly been used to study the ecology of lakes in recent years (Dörnhöfer and Oppelt, 2016). Satellite data has been used to study the surface temperatures in extended geographical regions, such as France (Prats et al, 2018a), the Tibetan Plateau (Wan et al, 2017), the Arctic Coastal Plane (Huang et al, 2017), the US (Schaeffer et al, 2018) or even at world scale (Schneider and Hook, 2010;Layden et al, 2015). In other cases, satellite images have been used to study internal thermal patterns in lakes (Marti-Cardona et al, 2008;Allan et al, 2016;Woolway and Merchant, 2018), longitudinal surface thermal gradients in reservoirs (Martí-Cardona et al, 2016;Ling et al, 2017) or how lakes respond to meteorological forcing Merchant, 2017,2018).…”

“…Skin temperature is the temperature that should be used for the calculation of surface fluxes of heat and gas (Kawai and Wada, 2007), but for the biological and management points of view bulk surface temperature is the relevant temperature (Handcock et al, 2012). Depending on the time of the day and meteorological conditions the differences between skin temperature and bulk temperature can amount to a few degrees (Wilson et al, 2013;Prats et al, 2018a).…”