Construction of High Spatial-Temporal Water Body Dataset in China Based on Sentinel-1 Archives and GEE

Abstract

Surface water is the most important resource and environmental factor in maintaining human survival and ecosystem stability; therefore, timely accurate information on dynamic surface water is urgently needed. However, the existing water datasets fall short of the current needs of the various organizations and disciplines due to the limitations of optical sensors in dynamic water mapping. The advancement of the cloud-based Google Earth Engine (GEE) platform and free-sharing Sentinel-1 imagery makes it possible to map the dynamics of a surface water body with high spatial-temporal resolution on a large scale. This study first establishes a water extraction method oriented towards Sentinel-1 Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) data based on the statistics of a large number of samples of land-cover types. An unprecedented high spatial-temporal water body dataset in China (HSWDC) with monthly temporal and 10-m spatial resolution using the Sentinel-1 data from 2016 to 2018 is developed in this study. The HSWDC is validated by 14,070 random samples across China. A high classification accuracy (overall accuracy = 0.93, kappa coefficient = 0.86) is achieved. The HSWDC is highly consistent with the Global Surface Water Explorer dataset and water levels from satellite altimetry. In addition to the good performance of detecting frozen water and small water bodies, the HSWDC can also classify various water cover/uses, which are obtained from its high spatial-temporal resolution. The HSWDC dataset can provide more detailed information on surface water bodies in China and has good application potential for developing high-resolution wetland maps.