An Effective Water Body Extraction Method with New Water Index for Sentinel-2 Imagery

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Abstract

Surface water bodies, such as rivers, lakes, and reservoirs, play an irreplaceable role in global ecosystems and climate systems. Sentinel-2 imagery provides new high-resolution satellite remote sensing data. Based on the analysis of the spectral characteristics of the Sentinel-2 satellite, a novel water index called the Sentinel-2 water index (SWI) that is based on the vegetation-sensitive red-edge band (Band 5) and shortwave infrared (Band 11) bands was developed. Four representative water body types, namely, Taihu Lake, Yangtze River, Chaka Salt Lake, and Chain Lake, were selected as study areas to conduct a water body extraction performance comparison with the normalized difference water index (NDWI). We found that (1) the contrast value of the SWI was larger than that of the NDWI in terms of various water body types, including purer water, turbid water, salt water, and floating ice, which suggested that the SWI could achieve better enhancement performance for water bodies. (2) An effective water body extraction method was proposed by integrating the SWI and Otsu algorithm, which could accurately extract various water body types with high overall accuracy. (3) The method effectively extracted large water bodies and wide river channels by suppressing shadow noise in urban areas. Our results suggested that the novel method can achieve efficient water body extraction for rapidly and accurately extracting various water bodies from Sentinel-2 data and the novel method has application potential for larger-scale surface water mapping.

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Modification of normalised difference water index (NDWI) to enhance open water features in remotely sensed imagery

Hanqiu Xu (2006)

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High-resolution mapping of global surface water and its long-term changes.

Jean-François Pekel, Andrew Cottam, Noel Gorelick … (2016)

The location and persistence of surface water (inland and coastal) is both affected by climate and human activity and affects climate, biological diversity and human wellbeing. Global data sets documenting surface water location and seasonality have been produced from inventories and national descriptions, statistical extrapolation of regional data and satellite imagery, but measuring long-term changes at high resolution remains a challenge. Here, using three million Landsat satellite images, we quantify changes in global surface water over the past 32 years at 30-metre resolution. We record the months and years when water was present, where occurrence changed and what form changes took in terms of seasonality and persistence. Between 1984 and 2015 permanent surface water has disappeared from an area of almost 90,000 square kilometres, roughly equivalent to that of Lake Superior, though new permanent bodies of surface water covering 184,000 square kilometres have formed elsewhere. All continental regions show a net increase in permanent water, except Oceania, which has a fractional (one per cent) net loss. Much of the increase is from reservoir filling, although climate change is also implicated. Loss is more geographically concentrated than gain. Over 70 per cent of global net permanent water loss occurred in the Middle East and Central Asia, linked to drought and human actions including river diversion or damming and unregulated withdrawal. Losses in Australia and the USA linked to long-term droughts are also evident. This globally consistent, validated data set shows that impacts of climate change and climate oscillations on surface water occurrence can be measured and that evidence can be gathered to show how surface water is altered by human activities. We anticipate that this freely available data will improve the modelling of surface forcing, provide evidence of state and change in wetland ecotones (the transition areas between biomes), and inform water-management decision-making.