Using Remote Sensing to Monitor Spatial and Temporal Surface Water Changes within the Lake Victoria Watershed during the 2019-2020 Floods

Lake Victoria, the largest lake in Africa, experienced record high lake levels, extreme precipitation, and abnormal flooding in 2019-2020. The floods displaced thousands of people in nearby cities and villages who rely on the watershed's ecosystem services for fishing, tourism, and freshwater. Challenges associated with the lake aside from flooding include overfishing, pollution, invasive species, waterborne disease, droughts, and water management agreements between Uganda, Kenya, Tanzania, Burundi, and Rwanda. Monitoring hydrological characteristics of the watershed at short (daily to weekly) and long scales (yearly to decadal) is important to understand flood hazard and risk within the Lake Victoria Watershed. Since in-situ observations are limited in the region, remote sensing via satellite-based Earth observations are used to fill the data gap. This study aims to leverage NASA Earth observations to monitor the spatial and temporal surface water change within the Lake Victoria watershed during the 2019-2020 floods. Comparisons of soil moisture, precipitation, and altimetry characteristics are included and are respectively derived from Soil Moisture Active Passive (SMAP), the Integrated Multisatellite Retrievals for Global Precipitation Measurement (GPM IMERG), and Jason-3. Results from this study can be used to improve understanding of flood dynamics in the Lake Victoria watershed under extreme rainfall conditions, which can serve as early indicators of future major flooding events.