Surface water monitoring from 1984 to 2021 based on Landsat time-series images and Google Earth Engine

Dynamic monitoring of surface water bodies is essential for understanding global climate change and the impact of human activities on water resources. Satellite remote sensing is characterized by large-scale monitoring, timely updates, and simplicity, and it has become an important means of obtaining the distribution of surface water bodies. This study is based on a long time-series Landsat satellite images and the Google Earth Engine (GEE) platform, focusing on Anhui Province in China, and proposes a method for extracting surface water that combines water indices, Bias-Corrected Fuzzy Clustering Method (BCFCM), and OTSU threshold segmentation. The spatial distribution of surface water in Anhui Province was obtained from 1984 to 2021, and further analysis was conducted on the spatiotemporal characteristics of surface water in each city and three major river basins within the province. The results indicated that the overall accuracy of water extraction in this study was 94.06 %. Surface water in Anhui was most abundant in 1998 and least in 2001, with more distribution in the south than in the north. Northern Anhui is dominated by rivers, while southern Anhui has more lakes. Permanent surface water with an inundation frequency of above 75% covered approximately 4341 km2, accounting for 32.03 % of the total water, while seasonal water with an inundation frequency between 5 % and 75 % covered about 6661 km2, accounting for 49.15 % of the total water, others were considered temporary surface water. By comparing our results with the global annual surface water released by the Joint Research Centre (JRC), we found that our study performed better in extracting lakes and rivers in terms of completeness, but the extraction results for aquaculture areas were slightly less than the JRC dataset. Overall, the long-term surface water dataset established in this study can effectively supplement the existing datasets and provide important references for regional water resource investigation, management, as well as flood monitoring.