Obtaining Accurate Water Level Measurements in Lakes: Analysis of Changes in ICESat Altimetry Accuracy With Buffer Changes

Determining the accuracy of lake water levels calculated based on Ice, Cloud, and land Elevation Satellite (ICESat) data mainly relies on identifying lake water footprints (LWFs), which are obtained using an overlay analysis of lake water masks (LWMs) and ICESat tracks. However, most previous studies that have conducted a buffer analysis based on LWMs have set the buffer size subjectively without providing a detailed explanation for this or conducting a system analysis. In this study, the effects of using inside and outside buffers to obtain LWMs for seven lakes are analyzed. The Modified Normalized Difference Water Index (MNDWI) was applied to extract LWMs from Thematic Mapper (TM) images. The boxplot was used to remove footprints with abnormal elevations, and then the average of the remaining footprints was calculated as the ICESat water level. To compare with the in situ measured data, the root mean square error (RMSE) was used for accuracy evaluation. Results show the following: (1) for Yamzhog Yumco, which is a narrow lake, the altimetry accuracy is higher when using the outside buffer than for the inside buffer or with no buffer, and the highest accuracy is obtained with an outside buffer of approximately 100 m. (2) For other relatively wide lakes, such as Lake Michigan, Lake Erie, Lake Huron, Lake Ontario and Lake Superior, the inside buffer method does not always improve altimetry accuracy, and this result differs from those presented previously. (3) For different lakes, the range of change in altimetry accuracy is affected by the number of LWFs. This study is of value for use in studies that apply ICESat altimetry data to obtain changes in lake water levels, especially for relatively narrow lakes, and the results imply that the altimetry accuracy can be improved by using the outside buffer.