Analysis of Surface Temperature Trends of World's Major Lakes and Relationships with their Basins' Characteristics
Abstract
The traces of climate change have affected many aspects of our environment. There are over 100 million lakes on Earth (excluding those that are covered with glaciers), covering roughly 4% of the land surface. Even though a small percentage, the lakes harbor almost half of the carbon that all the world's oceans do which makes them very important for our planet. Dying Lakes are one of the climate change phenomena that are some due to the human mismanagement, pollution, and loss. They can affect our water supplies and the habitat for birds and fish. The variations in Land Surface Temperature (LST) of lakes could be one indicator of these changes, especially in the world's dying Lakes. This project focuses on the application of remote sensing and geographic information system for change in land cover, and analysis on its impact on the surface temperature trends of the 200 major lakes around the world. An analysis of LST variation over the global lakes have been conducted using observations from the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS), an infrared-based satellite platform. MODIS Land Surface Temperature Version 6 provides LST data twice a day since 2002. The data products were first processed to obtain the average daily temperature over the lakes and their surrounding land areas from 2002 July to 2018 May. A statistical approach was applied to calculate the temperature trends in the lake (water), surrounding land, and the difference between land and water. Moreover, the relationships between the LST trends and potential driving factors such as the landcover changes in the lakes' basins, lakes areas, depth, and location were investigated. The results show that there is a direct relationship between changes in the lakes area and the trends in the lake temperature and the surrounding land temperature. Moreover, they reveal that the lakes that have been shrinking over years have more consistent changes between land and water temperature trends while the lakes that were affected due to local problems had varying temperature trends between water and land. Lakes with smaller surface areas showed more significant changes in LST when compared with larger lakes. This study will shed some lights in understanding the lakes' temperature on a global scale.
- Publication:
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AGU Fall Meeting Abstracts
- Pub Date:
- December 2018
- Bibcode:
- 2018AGUFMGC24C..08B
- Keywords:
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- 1616 Climate variability;
- GLOBAL CHANGEDE: 1632 Land cover change;
- GLOBAL CHANGEDE: 1637 Regional climate change;
- GLOBAL CHANGEDE: 1640 Remote sensing;
- GLOBAL CHANGE