Spatiotemporal change in the surface temperature of Himalayan lake and its inter-relation with water quality and growth in aquatic vegetation

Abstract

Lake surface temperature (LST) monitoring is important as it plays a vital role in understanding the functioning of lakes and significantly shapes water ecological environments. A geospatial analysis was carried out to observe changes in LST for Wular lake during 1992 to 2017 using Landsat thermal data. This study revealed a warming trend in LST with increase in 1.82 °C for the period (1992–2017). It was perceived that LST significantly influences the water quality parameters and revealed a statistically significant relationship with R² > 0.5 with a significance value (p) < .001 for most of the parameters. Ground validation of satellite-derived LST was done with in situ measurement having R² and standard error of estimate equal to 0.71 and 0.77, respectively. Furthermore, Pearson’s correlation indicated towards a significantly positive relationship between normalized difference vegetation index and LST is an indicative of growth of aquatic vegetation in lake bed over the years.

Keywords:

• Aquatic vegetation
• lake surface temperature
• regression models
• spatiotemporal
• Wular lake

Acknowledgements

The authors thank NASA for making the Landsat data sets freely available in the University of Maryland under the umbrella of Global Land Cover Facility (GLCF) and US Geological Survey Web server.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Additional information

Funding

The authors acknowledge the financial assistance provided by the Science and Engineering Research Board (N-PDF) to carry out current research work.