A remote sensing method for estimating regional reservoir area and evaporative loss

摘要

Highlights?Evaporation from 200 reservoirs is equivalent to 53% of total water use in Texas.?Reservoir evaporative loss could exceed required minimum environmental flow.?The performance of MNDWI is spatially variable.?Google Earth Engine enables geospatial big data analysis for reservoir mapping.AbstractEvaporation from the water surface of a reservoir can significantly affect its function of ensuring the availability and temporal stability of water supply. Current estimations of reservoir evaporative loss are dependent on water area derived from a reservoir storage-area curve. Such curves are unavailable if the reservoir is located in a data-sparse region or questionable if long-term sedimentation has changed the original elevation-area relationship. We propose a remote sensing framework to estimate reservoir evaporative loss at the regional scale. This framework uses a multispectral water index to extract reserv