Regional monitoring and online publication of winter snowpack to spring and summer water levels by integrating satellite and aerial remote sensing data

English Abstract:

The ability to map and monitor headwater snowpacks, and downstream spring and summertime open water storage at regional scales allows improved estimates and simulation of watershed water balance and flood inundation potential. The study presents early development stages of an online Provincial monitoring framework for snowpack and wetland open water storage. Winter snowpack assessments in mountainous catchments in the Rockies, urban and wetland environments in Alberta will be presented for 2013 to 2015, as will summertime open water classifications for a prairie watershed in Alberta, western Canada. Airborne lidar data were used to map baseline and snow surface data in headwaters while temporal satellite image stacks from the RapidEye and RadarSat satellites were integrated with high-resolution lidar to delineate water inundation extents. GIS techniques were developed to extract lidar-derived water surface elevations and track the spatio-temporal variation in pond and lake levels. Water bodies were assigned unique identifiers so that levels could be tracked and linked to their associated watershed channel reach. The procedure of optical image classification through to merging of individual water bodies into watershed channel topology and extracting reach water levels has been automated with python scripts. The presentation will describe the methods, early results, existing challenges, as well as the anticipated online delivery of this Alberta cloud-based water monitoring portal. Future efforts will be directed towards integration of the cloud-based system with existing provincial and federal hydrometric data sources and models to supplement operational resource management needs whilst supporting more rapid and open access to data.