LakeSST: Lake Skin Surface Temperatures in French inland water bodies for 1999–2016 from Landsat archives

The spatial and temporal coverage of the Landsat satellite imagery make it an ideal resource for studies on the long term evolution of lake surface temperature and for geographical studies of temperature patterns. The Lake Skin Surface Temperature (LakeSST) data set contains skin surface temperature data for 442 French water bodies (natural lakes, reservoirs, ponds, gravel pit lakes and quarry lakes) for the period 1999–2016 obtained from the thermal band of Landsat 5 and Landsat 7 archive images. The skin temperature measured by satellites differs slightly from water temperature in the first meters of the water column because of cool skin and warm layer effects. Nevertheless surface temperature parameterizations originally developed for the sea can be used to adjust LakeSST to commonly used lake water temperature, e.g. surface temperature or temperature of the first 1~2 m. Moreover, theoretically small differences are to be expected between the freshwater and seawater case for low wind speeds. In fact, at the reservoir of Bimont, the estimated cool skin effect was about −0.3 ºC and −0.6 ºC most of time, while the warm layer effect at 0.55 m was negligible in average, but could occasionally attain several degrees and a cool layer was often observed in the night. The overall accuracy of the satellite-derived temperature measurements was about 1.5 ºC, similar to other applications of satellite images to estimate freshwater surface temperatures. The LakeSST data are available at https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.1041746.