Abstract
The Tibetan Plateau is known as the “Asian water tower”, and changes in its surface water distribution are important indicators of global climate change and the regional response to these changes. Dynamic monitoring of the surface water on the Tibetan Plateau is an important part of the research on the functions of the “third pole” of the earth and the Asian water tower. With the support of the Google Earth Engine cloud platform, this study used a spectral index-based fast extraction method to obtain surface water data from multi-temporal Landsat (Landsat 4, 5, and 8) satellite remote sensing images. Based on the extracted surface water data, we analyzed the spatiotemporal variations in the surface water of the Tibetan Plateau from 1980s to 2019. In this study, surface water area refers to the maximum coverage area of the surface water extracted from remote sensing images for one year, hereafter referred to as the surface water area. The results show that since 1980s, the overall surface water area of the Tibetan Plateau has increased, but not in a linear fashion. After a slight decrease from 1980s to 1995, the surface water area of the Tibetan Plateau increased steadily, except for a slight decrease in 2015, which may have been caused by the El Niño phenomenon. In terms of spatiotemporal distribution, different patterns exist in the various ecological regions of the Tibetan Plateau. The Inner ecological region had the greatest changes of surface water area among the ten ecological regions, accounting for 71.0% of the total surface water area increase from 1980s to 2019. The surface water bodies in the cold desert and the dry-winter subtropical climatic regions underwent the most changes, with their coefficients of variation being more than 20%. This study can provide data support for dynamic monitoring of surface water in the Tibetan Plateau.
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Acknowledgements
This study was funded by the Second Tibetan Plateau Scientific Expedition and Research Program (STEP, Grant No.2019QZKK0307), the National Natural Science Foundation of China (NSFC, Grant No.61731022), and the National Key Research and Development Program of China (Grant No.2016YFA0600302).
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Liu, Hc., He, Gj., Peng, Y. et al. Dynamic monitoring of surface water in the Tibetan Plateau from 1980s to 2019 based on satellite remote sensing images. J. Mt. Sci. 18, 2833–2841 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11629-020-6482-8
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11629-020-6482-8