ESTABLISHING LINKAGES BETWEEN THE SATELLITE OBSERVED SURFACE WATER DYNAMICS AND POTENTIAL DRIVERS OF CHANGE IN HIGH NORTHERN LATITUDES OF NORTH AMERICA ...
Climate change is affecting aspects of life across the globe. Nowhere is this more prevalent than in the High Northern Latitudes where the Arctic Amplification of climate change has resulted in rates of warming that are twice the global average. Rising air temperatures drive deeper thawing of permaf...
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| Format: | Doctoral or Postdoctoral Thesis |
| Language: | English |
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Digital Repository at the University of Maryland
2018
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| Online Access: | https://dx.doi.org/10.13016/m2s756p11 http://drum.lib.umd.edu/handle/1903/20898 |
| Summary: | Climate change is affecting aspects of life across the globe. Nowhere is this more prevalent than in the High Northern Latitudes where the Arctic Amplification of climate change has resulted in rates of warming that are twice the global average. Rising air temperatures drive deeper thawing of permafrost which is expressed, among many other ways, through changes in surface water extent. In this dissertation I developed annual maps of surface water extent from a 30 year series of satellite observations from Landsat over a large region of North American tundra. These maps were used in an object based approach to identify water bodies that show a significant trend in surface area over the past 30 years. Over 25% of the 675,000 water bodies in my study region experienced a statistically significant (p<0.05) trend in surface area change between 1985 and 2015. The analysis reveals that water bodies with a net increasing trend and those with a net decreasing trend are spatially clustered. A distinct pattern of ... |
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