ABSTRACT

The importance of water cannot be overstated. Not only it is essential for life, it is a vital resource for sustainable development. Water resource management is pivotal to ensure water security and sustainability. Having such water monitoring resources is challenging, especially in less developed countries that have limited resources. With the advancement in technology and availability of open-access satellite data, there are opportunities to reinforce the abilities of researchers and decision-makers to monitor and identify changes in water resources. In this work, we describe an easy to implement workflow for estimation of surface area of waterbodies using open-access data from Sentinel-2 satellites. The method uses Normalized Difference Water Index (NDWI) for surface water detection that is used to estimate the surface area of the waterbody and analyse changes over a period of time. We develop four case studies based on waterbodies in Spain, Morocco, and India to highlight how satellite imaging can effectively help in estimating and visualizing the changes in water surface area. Temperature and rainfall data are analysed to understand the impact of climate change on water resources due to increase in temperature and changes in precipitation patterns. The proposed method is validated by testing it on four additional lakes and comparing the results with publicly available data. We show how open-access satellite data can potentially be used for regular monitoring of waterbodies as well as filling the knowledge gap to assist in decision making at both local and regional levels.

摘要

水的重要性不可夸大。它不仅是生命必不可少的，而且是可持续发展的重要资源。水资源管理对于确保水的安全和可持续性至关重要。拥有这样的水监测资源具有挑战性，特别是在资源有限的欠发达国家中。随着技术的进步和开放获取卫星数据的可用性，有机会增强研究人员和决策者监测和识别水资源变化的能力。在这项工作中，我们描述了一个易于实现的工作流，该工作流使用Sentinel-2卫星的开放获取数据估算水体的表面积。该方法使用归一化差异水指数（NDWI）进行地表水检测，该水用于估算水体的表面积并分析一段时间内的变化。我们基于西班牙，摩洛哥和印度的水体开发了四个案例研究，以突出卫星成像如何有效地帮助估算和可视化水表面积的变化。分析温度和降雨数据，以了解由于温度升高和降水模式变化而引起的气候变化对水资源的影响。通过在另外四个湖泊上对其进行测试，并将结果与​​公开数据进行比较，验证了该方法的有效性。