Large-Scale Surface Water Mapping Based on Landsat and Sentinel-1 Images

Abstract

Surface water is a highly dynamical object on the earth’s surface. At present, satellite remote sensing is the most effective way to accurately depict the temporal and spatial variation characteristics of surface water on a large scale. In this study, a region-adaptive random forest algorithm is designed on the Google Earth Engine (GEE) for automatic surface water mapping by using data from multi-sensors such as Landsat 7 ETM+, Landsat 8 OLI, and Sentinel-1 SAR images as source data, and China as a case study region. The visual comparison of the mapping results with the original images under different landform areas shows that the extracted water body boundary is consistent with the water range in the image. The cross-validation with the JRC GSW validation samples shows a very high precision that the average producer’s accuracy and average user’s accuracy of water is 0.933 and 0.998, respectively. The average overall accuracy and average kappa is 0.966 and 0.931, respectively. The independent verification results of lakes with different areas also prove the high accuracy for our method, with a maximum average error of 3.299%. These results show that the method is an ideal way for large-scale surface water mapping with a high spatial–temporal resolution.