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Fresh water is arguably the most vital resource for all aspects of a healthy and stable environment and society. Monitoring the extent of surface water enables resource managers to detect perturbations and long-term trends in water availability and set consumption guidelines accordingly. Radar in general, and RADARSAT-1 in particular, is very good at detecting open surface water and has been used operationally for flood monitoring in many countries. Significant radar data archives now exist to analyse seasonal, annual, and decadal trends in surface water availability. A software tool (Forest non-Forest Class Extraction or FnFCE), based on software initially designed for deforestation classification with RADARSAT-1 data and later modified to include a flood mapping capability, has been adapted for this surface water application. Three test sites have been selected to demonstrate this surface water mapping tool, including Fort Mackay, Alberta, a tar sands area with water used for industrial purposes; Cache Lake in Tuktut Nogait National Park, Northwest Territories, where the many park lakes are currently poorly monitored and understood; and Old Crow Flats, Yukon Territory, a large area of ponds and lakes thought to be at risk from permafrost degradation and important to caribou migration and oil and gas development. This paper describes the software tool and demonstrates preliminary results of monitoring seasonal and annual changes in surface water distribution using RADARSAT-1 imagery for the three test sites. An overview of the successes and limitations of the approach is given, as well as a summary of the current state of evolution of the method and the envisioned software development plan.
Brisco et al. (Thu,) studied this question.