Local isotropy indicator for SAR image filtering: application to Envisat/ASAR images of the Doñana Wetland

This paper explores a geometrical and computationally simple operator, named Ds, for local isotropy assessment on SAR images. It is assumed that isotropic intensity distributions in natural areas, either textured or nontextured, correspond to a single cover class. Ds is used to measure isotropy in processing neighborhoods and decide if they can be considered as belonging to a unique cover class. The speckle statistical properties are used to determine suitable Ds thresholds for discriminating heterogeneous targets from isotropic cover types at different window sizes. An assessment of Ds as an edge detector showed sensitivities similar to those of the ratio edge operator for straight, sharp boundaries, centered in the processing window, but significantly better sensitivity for detecting heterogeneities during the window expansion in multiresolution filtering. Furthermore, Ds presents the advantage versus the ratio edge coefficient of being rotationally invariant, and its computation indicates the direction of the main intensity gradient in the processing window. The Ds operator is used in a multiresolution fashion for filtering ASAR scenes of the Doñana wetland. The intensities in isotropic areas are averaged in order to flatten fluctuations within cover types and facilitate a subsequent land cover classification. The results show high degree of smoothing within textured cover classes, plus effective spatial adaptation to gradients and irregular boundaries, substantiating the usefulness of this operator for filtering SAR data of natural areas with the purpose of classification

Envisat/ASAR Images for the Calibration of Wind Drag Action in the Donana Wetlands 2D Hydrodynamic Model

Donana National Park wetlands are located in southwest Spain, on the right bank of the Guadalquivir River, near the Atlantic Ocean coast. The wetlands dry out completely every summer and progressively flood again throughout the fall and winter seasons. Given the flatness of Donana's topography, the wind drag action can induce the flooding or emergence of extensive areas, detectable in remote sensing images. Envisat/ASAR scenes acquired before and during strong and persistent wind episodes enabled the spatial delineation of the wind-induced water displacement. A two-dimensional hydrodynamic model of Donana wetlands was built in 2006 with the aim to predict the effect of proposed hydrologic restoration actions within Donana's basin. In this work, on-site wind records and concurrent ASAR scenes are used for the calibration of the wind-drag modeling by assessing different formulations. Results show a good adjustment between the modeled and observed wind drag effect. Displacements of up to 2 km in the wind direction are satisfactorily reproduced by the hydrodynamic model, while including an atmospheric stability parameter led to no significant improvement of the results. Such evidence will contribute to a more accurate simulation of hypothetic or design scenarios, when no information is available for the atmospheric stability assessment. Doñana National Park wetlands are located in southwest Spain, on the right bank of the Guadalquivir River, near the Atlantic Ocean coast. The wetlands dry out completely every summer and progressively flood again throughout the fall and winter seasons. Given the flatness of Doñana’s topography, the wind drag action can induce the flooding or emergence of extensive areas, detectable in remote sensing images. Envisat/ASAR scenes acquired before and during strong and persistent wind episodes enabled the spatial delineation of the wind-induced water displacement. A two-dimensional hydrodynamic model of Doñana wetlands was built in 2006 with the aim to predict the effect of proposed hydrologic restoration actions within Doñana’s basin. In this work, on-site wind records and concurrent ASAR scenes are used for the calibration of the wind-drag modeling by assessing different formulations. Results show a good adjustment between the modeled and observed wind drag effect. Displacements of up to 2 km in the wind direction are satisfactorily reproduced by the hydrodynamic model, while including an atmospheric stability parameter led to no significant improvement of the results. Such evidence will contribute to a more accurate simulation of hypothetic or design scenarios, when no information is available for the atmospheric stability assessmen

ASAR polarimetric, multi-incidence angle and multitemporal characterization of Doñana wetlands for flood extent monitoring

Doñana National Park wetlands, in South West Spain, undergo yearly cycles of inundation and drying out. During the hydrological year 2006–2007, 43 ASAR/Envisat images of Doñana, mostly in HH and VV polarizations, were acquired with the aim to monitor the flood extent evolution during an entire flooding cycle. The images were ordered in the seven ASAR incidence angles, also referred to as swaths, to achieve high observation frequency. In this study, backscattering temporal signatures of the main land cover types in Doñana were obtained for the different incidence angles and polarizations. Plots showing the σ0HH/σ0VV ratio behavior were also produced. The signatures were analyzed with the aid of miscellaneous site data in order to identify the effect of the flooding on the backscattering. Conclusions on the feasibility to discriminate emerged versus flooded land are derived for the different incidence angles, land cover types and phenological stages: intermediate incidence angles (ASAR IS3 and IS4) came up as the most appropriate single swaths to discriminate open water surface from smooth bare soil in the marshland deepest areas. Flood mapping in pasture lands, the most elevated regions, is feasible at steep to mid incidence angles (ASAR IS1 to IS4). In the medium elevation zones, colonized by large helophytes, shallow incidence angles (ASAR IS6 and IS7) enable more accurate flood delineation during the vegetation growing phase. Since Doñana land covers require different observation swaths for flood detection, the composition of different incidence angle images close in time provides the optimum flood mapping. Such composition is possible four times per ASAR 35-day orbit cycle, using pairs of 12-h apart IS1/IS6 and IS2/IS5 Doñana images

Two-dimensional numerical modeling of wood transport

The transport of wood material in rivers has been the subject of various studies in recent years. Most research has focused on the ecological and geomorphologic role of wood, its recruitment processes and spatial distribution in streams. In this study, we focused on wood transport dynamics, and we have developed a numerical model to simulate wood transport coupled with a two-dimensional (2D) hydrodynamic model. For this purpose, wood drag forces were incorporated as additional source terms into the shallow water equations, which are solved together with wood transport by using the finite volume method. This new tool has been implemented as a computational module into ‘Iber’, a 2D hydraulic simulation software. The new module analyzes the initial motion threshold of wood based on the balance of forces involved in the wood's movement, and computes the position and velocity of differently shaped logs using a kinematic approach. The method also considers the interaction between the logs themselves and between the logs and the channel walls or boundaries. Flume experiments were used in a straight channel with obstructions to validate the model's capacity to accurately reproduce the movement of floating logs

Wetland inundation monitoring by the synergistic use of ENVISAT/ASAR imagery and ancilliary spatial data

Wetlands are among the most ecologically important ecosystems on Earth and their sustainability depends critically on the water resources. In a scenario of climate change and increased anthropogenic pressure, detailed monitoring of the water resources provides a fundamental tool to assess the ecosystem health and identify potential threats. Doñana wetlands, in Southwest Spain, dry out every summer and progressively flood in fall and winter to a maximum extent of 30,000 ha. The wetland filling up process was monitored in detail during the 2006–2007 hydrologic cycle by means of twenty-one Envisat/ASAR scenes, acquired at different incidence angles in order to maximize the observation frequency. Flood mapping from the two uncorrelated ASAR channel data alone was proved unfeasible due to the complex casuistic of Doñana cover backscattering. This study addresses the synergistic utilization of the ASAR data together with Doñana's digital elevation model and vegetation map in order to achieve flood mapping. Filtering and clustering algorithms were developed for the automated generation of Doñana flood maps from the ASAR images. The use of irregular filtering neighborhoods adapted to the elevation contours drastically improved the ASAR image filtering. Edge preservation was excellent, since natural edges closely follow terrain contours. Isotropic neighborhoods were assumed of a single class and their intensities were averaged. As a result, intensity fluctuations due to speckle and texture over areas of the same cover type were smoothed remarkably. The clustering and classification algorithm operate on individual sub-basins, as the pixel elevation is more accurately related to the cover classes within them. Vegetation and elevation maps plus knowledge of Doñana backscattering characteristics from preceding studies were initially used to select seed pixels with high confidence on their class membership. Next, a region growing algorithm extends the seed regions with new pixels based on their planimmetric adjacency and backscattering Mahalanobis distance to the seeds. During the seed region growth, new pixels' possible classes are not constrained to their cover type according to the vegetation map, so the algorithm is able to capture temporal changes in the vegetation spatial distribution. Comparison of the resultant classification and concurrent ground truth yielded 92% of flood mapping accuracy. The flood mapping method is applicable to the available ASAR images of Doñana from six other hydrologic cycles

Modelling Lake Titicaca's daily and monthly evaporation

International audienceLake Titicaca is a crucial water resource in the central part of the Andean mountain range, and it is one of the lakes most affected by climate warming. Since surface evaporation explains most of the lake's water losses, reliable estimates are paramount to the prediction of global warming impacts on Lake Titicaca and to the region's water resource planning and adaptation to climate change. Evaporation estimates were done in the past at monthly time steps and using the four methods as follows: water balance , heat balance, and the mass transfer and Penman's equations. The obtained annual evaporation values showed significant dispersion. This study used new, daily frequency hydro-meteorological measurements. Evaporation losses were calculated following the mentioned methods using both daily records and their monthly averages to assess the impact of higher temporal resolution data in the evaporation estimates. Changes in the lake heat storage needed for the heat balance method were estimated based on the morning water surface temperature, because convection during nights results in a well-mixed top layer every morning over a constant temperature depth. We found that the most reliable method for determining the annual lake evaporation was the heat balance approach, although the Penman equation allows for an easier implementation based on generally available meteorological parameters. The mean annual lake evaporation was found to be 1700 mm year −1. This value is considered an upper limit of the annual evaporation, since the main study period was abnormally warm. The obtained upper limit lowers by 200 mm year −1 , the highest evaporation estimation obtained previously, thus reducing the uncertainty in the actual value. Regarding the evaporation estimates using daily and monthly averages, these resulted in minor differences for all method-ologies

Modelling Lake Titicaca's daily and monthly evaporation

Lake Titicaca is a crucial water resource in the central part of the Andean mountain range, and it is one of the lakes most affected by climate warming. Since surface evaporation explains most of the lake's water losses, reliable estimates are paramount to the prediction of global warming impacts on Lake Titicaca and to the region's water resource planning and adaptation to climate change. Evaporation estimates were done in the past at monthly time steps and using the four methods as follows: water balance, heat balance, and the mass transfer and Penman's equations. The obtained annual evaporation values showed significant dispersion. This study used new, daily frequency hydro-meteorological measurements. Evaporation losses were calculated following the mentioned methods using both daily records and their monthly averages to assess the impact of higher temporal resolution data in the evaporation estimates. Changes in the lake heat storage needed for the heat balance method were estimated based on the morning water surface temperature, because convection during nights results in a well-mixed top layer every morning over a constant temperature depth. We found that the most reliable method for determining the annual lake evaporation was the heat balance approach, although the Penman equation allows for an easier implementation based on generally available meteorological parameters. The mean annual lake evaporation was found to be 1700&thinsp;mm&thinsp;year<span classCombining double low line"inline-formula'1</span>. This value is considered an upper limit of the annual evaporation, since the main study period was abnormally warm. The obtained upper limit lowers by 200&thinsp;mm&thinsp;year<span classCombining double low line"inline-formula">ĝ'1</span>, the highest evaporation estimation obtained previously, thus reducing the uncertainty in the actual value. Regarding the evaporation estimates using daily and monthly averages, these resulted in minor differences for all methodologies