Area Change and Cause Analysis of Bosten Lake based on Multi-source Remote Sensing Data and GEE Platform

Bosten Lake is a typical inland lake in the arid zone. The change in the lake area is strongly related to local natural and cultural environmental changes. Based on the GIS and RS technologies, this paper combines Landsat imagery and MODIS data, including a total of 2289 scenes, with JRC GSW water mask products to characterize the interannual and intraannual changes of the area of Bosten Lake from 2000 to 2019 through the Google Earth Engine (GEE) platform using index methods. We use the 2019 Sentinel-2 images to compare and analyze the results. To quantify the the causes of the changes, we analyzed the human activities and daily meteorological data of Yanqi, Korla and Bayanbuluk meteorological stations during 2000-2018. Results show that: (1) the GEE is efficient for integrating multi-temporal high-resolution remote sensing data to analyze the temporal change of lake area, especially the intraannual change. Compared with Landsat-5/7/8 and MOD09GQ data, the lake shoreline extracted based on Sentinel-2 images shows more details due to their high temporal and spatial resolution; (2) during 2000-2013, the total lake area decreases by 181.66 km2 with a decreasing rate of 13.98km2/a; while during 2013-2019, the lake area increases by 133.13 km2 with a increasing rate of 22.19 km2/a; (3) Intraannually, the lake area shows an upward trend from Mar. to Jun., keeps peak until September, and decreases from Oct. to Dec. and (4) the interannual change of Bosten Lake area has no significant correlations with the changes of evaporation, precipitation, and accumulated temperature within the watershed. While the intraannual change of Bosten Lake area shows strong correlations with those meteorological varabiles. © 2021, Science Press. All right reserved.