Lake topography and active storage from satellite observations of flood
frequency
Abstract
Topography is critical information for water resources management in
lakes, and remote sensing provides a unique opportunity to estimate it
in ungauged regions. We introduce here a new method which estimates near
shore topography of water bodies based on a flood frequency map and time
series of water levels by assuming the equivalence between flood
frequency and water level exceedance probability at a given area. Test
cases are performed for two lakes and 12 hydropower reservoirs in Brazil
using the proposed Flood2Topo app. This new application generates the
bottom level pixel by pixel and a level-area-active storage
relationships directly from the topography map, without the need to fit
functions. Flood extent estimates from the Landsat based JRC Global
Surface Water (GSW) dataset, current state-of-the-art, were used to run
Flood2Topo, together with water levels from satellite altimetry and
in-situ gauges. Results show bottom level root mean square deviation
(RMSD) values of 18.5 cm and 146 cm for Lake Poopó (Bolivia) and Lake
Curuai (Amazon basin), respectively. For reservoir active storage, RMSD
normalized values ranged from 2% to 11.09% for 11 reservoirs (average
NRMSD of 6.39 %). The method can be applied to any area seasonally
flooded, for instance, it is applicable in 35.8 % (86%) of the global
water surface area mapped by occurrence map from GSW dataset, when
considering the number of pixels with occurrence between 0 and 95%
(99%) over 35 years. This is a promising tool for obtaining data for
hydrodynamic simulations and monitoring of ungauged water bodies.