Lake water surface mapping in the Tibetan Plateau using the MODIS MOD09Q1 product

ABSTRACT

The Tibetan Plateau (TP) has the largest number of inland lakes with the highest elevation on the planet. Mapping the distribution of lake water in space and time is crucial for scientific research of interactions among the regional cryosphere, hydrosphere, and atmosphere. In this study, a lake water surface mapping algorithm is developed for Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) MOD09Q1 surface reflectance images, which is used to produce the 8-day lake water surface data set (lake water surface area larger than 1 km²) of theTP (Qinghai–Tibet Plateau) for the period of 2000–2012. The accuracy analysis indicate that compared with water surface data of the 134 sample lakes extracted from the 30 m Landsat Thematic Mapper (TM) images, the average overall accuracy of the results is 91.81% with average commission and omission error of 3.26% and 5.38%; the results also show strong linear (the coefficient of determination R² is 0.9991) correlation with the global MODIS water mask data set with overall accuracy of 86.30%; and the lake area difference between the Second National Lake Survey and this study is only 4.74%, respectively. This study provides reliable data set for the lake change research of theTP in the recent decade.

Acknowledgments

We are grateful to the NASA LP DAAC (Land Processes Distributed Active Archive Center) and the Remote Sensing Satellite Ground Station of the Institute of Remote Sensing and Digital Earth, Chinese Academy of Sciences, for providing the MODIS MOD09Q1 and Landsat TM images, respectively.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China [Grant Numbers: 41440010, 91637209, 41101401 and 41402297]; Non-profit Research Program of the Ministry of Water Resource [Grant Number: 201101015].