Quantifying change in North American Arctic lakes between 1990 and present.

Abstract:

The NASA Arctic and Boreal Vulnerability Experiment (ABoVE) is a new multi-year and mulit-disciplinary field campaign that is set to begin in 2015. One of the primary themes of this campaign is to understand the complicated hydrology of the region. Small lakes and ponds are a prominent feature of the landscape in the High Northern Latitudes. Previous mapping efforts have been accomplished with either single date medium to fine resolution imagery or multiple observations with coarse resolution imagery. The maps from single date imagery are prone to errors relate to weather phenomena such as flood and drought. The coarse resolution products are limited to larger water bodies and miss the many smaller lakes and ponds in the region.

We have created a time series of maps from Landsat Thematic Mapper and Enhanced Thematic Mapper in three epochs (1990 - 1992), (2000 - 2002), and (2010 - 2012) showing the location and extent of water bodies in the region. These maps represent the first comprehensive time series of water bodies in the region that have been generated with a consistent input data set at 30m spatial resolution. We can use these maps to quantify the amount of change that has occurred in the Arctic lakes over the past 20+ years. Here we will present the first versions of the maps with the associated structure and formats and some initial results from analysis of change in northern Canada.