Examining Intra- and Inter-annual Dynamics of Lakes of the Mackenzie River Delta, Northwest Territories, using Sentinel-1 SAR Time Series

• Main Author: Obadia, Mayah
• Other Authors: DeVries, Ben
• Format: Thesis
• Language: English
• Published: University of Guelph 2022
• Subjects: remote sensing; synthetic aperture radar; surface water; Arctic surface water; cold regions; time series analysis; polarimetric decomposition; Sentinel-1; speckle filter; Arctic; Northwest Territories; Mackenzie River; Canada; Mackenzie river
• Online Access: https://hdl.handle.net/10214/27236

Under the pressures of amplified Arctic warming, developing detailed spatiotemporal understandings of Arctic surface water systems is an urgent task. This thesis establishes a method for monitoring inundation in lakes and wetlands in the Mackenzie River Delta, using Sentinel-1 SAR. The importance of dual-polarimetric entropy and speckle filtering were evaluated in a set of random forest models. Results indicated that integrating entropy and omitting the speckle filter during SAR pre-processing may be promising for surface water modelling in the Mackenzie River Delta. Analysis of lake-level inundation variability revealed spatial clusters of variable and stable lakes and suggested that lake variability is sensitive to discharge volume of the Mackenzie River. The lake-tracking framework presented in this thesis can act as an important tool for evaluating the long-term hydrological response of Arctic ecosystems, to a rapidly changing climate. Ontario Graduate Scholarship Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada