Accuracy assessment of lake level and area measurement in the Qinghai-Tibet Plateau using simulated SWOT satellite data
As the "water tower of Asia", the Qinghai-Tibet Plateau is densely covered with alpine lakes, accounting for about half of China's lakes in both number and area. These lakes serve as critical indicators of climate and environmental conditions, highlighting the significance of monitoring their temporal variations in water level and volume. Launched in December 2022, the Surface Water and Ocean Topography (SWOT) mission will revolutionize our ability to observe global surface water dy-namics, providing unprecedented temporal resolution and areal altimetry patterns. However, prior to the official release of SWOT satellite data to the scientific community, it is important to assess its performance and measurement accuracy. To achieve this goal, this study uses the SWOT simulator to facilitate simulated observations of water levels and areas of selected lakes on the Qinghai-Tibet Plateau. These simulated results are then combined with in-situ data to assess the SWOT satellite's measurement accuracy in terms of temporal aliasing, altimetry errors, and area errors. The results show that the mean average percentage error of the temporal aliasing of the subsampled data is less than 4.1％, the average height measurement error is less than 3cm, and the area error is less than 7％ among these lakes. The development of this study has laid the foundation for the application of SWOT satellites on the lakes of the Qinghai-Tibet Plateau to better understand the response of future lake changes to climate change.
万方数据
维普
