Discipline: Ecology Environmental and Earth Sciences
Subcategory: Climate Change
Session: 1
Cho May Than - LaGuardia Community College
Co-Author(s): Hamidreza Norouzi, Abdou Bah, Patty Arunyaviku, Ronaldo Carhuaricra, Reginald Blake, New York City College of Technology
Lakes are among the vital components of our ecosystem and environment that are crucial for supplying fresh water, recreation, habitat’s lives and etc. There are over 100 million lakes on Earth (excluding those that are covered with glaciers and even though a small percentage of the earth, the lakes harbor almost half of the carbon that all the world’s oceans. Dying Lakes are one of the climate change phenomena that are some due to the human mismanagement, pollution, and loss. The variations in Land Surface Temperature (LST) of lakes could be one indicator of these changes, especially in the world’s dying Lakes. This project focuses on the application of remote sensing and geographic information system for change in land cover, and analysis on its impact on the surface temperature trends of the 250 major lakes around the world. The objective of this study is to study the differences between the changes of the surface temperature of water and their surrounding land to understand the underlying factors of lake area changes. An analysis of LST variation over the global lakes have been conducted using observations from the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS). MODIS Land Surface Temperature provides LST data twice a day since 2002. The data products were first processed to obtain the average daily temperature over the lakes and their surrounding land areas from 2002 July to 2018 August. A statistical approach was applied to calculate the temperature trends in the lake (water), the surrounding land, and the difference between land and water. Moreover, the relationships between the LST trends and potential driving factors such as the landcover changes in the lakes basins, lakes areas, depth, and location were investigated. The results show that there is a direct relationship between changes in the lakes area and the trends in the lake temperature and the surrounding land temperature. Lakes with smaller surface areas showed more significant changes in LST when compared with larger lakes. This study will shed some lights in understanding the lakes’ temperature on a global scale.
Funder Acknowledgement(s): This project is supported by the National Science Foundation Research Experiences for Undergraduates (Grant # 1560050), under the direction of Dr. Reginald A. Blake, Dr. Janet Liou-Mark, and Ms. Laura Yuen-Lau. The authors are grateful for the support from The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration - Cooperative Science Center for Earth System Sciences and Remote Sensing Technologies Summer Bridge program (Grant # NA16SEC4810008) under the direction of Dr. Reza Khanbilvardi and Dr. Shakila Merchant. The authors are solely responsible for the content of this article, and it does not necessarily represent the views of the NSF or of NOAA-CREST.
Faculty Advisor: Hamidreza Norouzi, HNorouzi@citytech.cuny.edu
Role: One of the main parts of the research project is the data acquisition and utilization. In this project, I mainly work on the acquisition of the Aqua MODIS Land Surface Temperature type (MYD11A1) and MODIS land cover type product (MCD12Q1). The data are collected to enable the right subset of the lake and its surrounding land. The next step of my work is to use the google map to determine the longitude and latitude of lakes which are indispensable for delineating lakes? area. I use MATLAB to analyze and visualize the MODIS data. Before applying statistical analysis, all the lakes surface temperature time series are ensured and checked by reading all data through the analyzing software. The same process applies to 200 lakes around the world.