Monitoring the Surface Ice Sheet of Çıldır Lake Using Sentinel-1 Data

Bilal Mutlu, Samet Aksoy, Serdar Erol
May, 2023

Abstract

Freezing of inland waters such as rivers and lakes constitutes an important component of the cryosphere. Monitoring of inland waters ice is important for reasons such as providing transportation through frozen water in winter when roads cannot allow transportation, monitoring the water accumulate and discharge activities of municipalities and industrial enterprises (hydroelectric energy, etc.) and preventing possible flood situations that adversely affect human life. Observing the ice on Çıldır Lake, which is an important attraction center of winter tourism and sports in our country, is very important in terms of monitoring the seasonal changes in the region and the safety of human life. Considering the location and size of the lake, the idea of using satellite-based observations instead of ground-based measurements comes to the fore. However, it is not possible to utilize optical satellite imagery due to severe (cloudy) weather conditions in winter months. Since Sentinel-1 synthetic aperture radar satellite mission data are not affected by atmospheric conditions and are available as open data, Sentinel-1 satellite mission data in VV polarization is used in the context of the study. In this study, with the help of the Otsu thresholding method, the average backscatter of the water areas were derived from the summer data and using these values, masking was performed on the images and possible ice sheet areas were determined. Afterwards, the changes in the possible ice region area values are presented as time series. The calculations performed within the scope of the study were carried out in Google Earth Engine (GEE) platform. In the later stages of this study, ice thickness estimation in Çıldır Lake will be made with machine learning methods by using in-situ data.

Type
Conference paper
Publication
In Türkiye Ulusal Fotogrametri ve Uzaktan Algılama Birliği (TUFUAB) XII. Teknik Sempozyumu
Bilal Mutlu
Bilal Mutlu
Research Assistant

My research interests include satellite geodesy, and natural hazard monitoring with geosensors. For more detailed information you can take a look at the summary of my Msc Thesis.