Assessment of the potential use of ICESat-2 data for bathymetric mapping of small lakes of Kazakhstan

Abstract

Lake bathymetry is of great importance for water resources management and hydrological modeling. Bathymetric mapping of lakes was predominantly conducted with the use of highly-priced methods such as airborne lidars, active imaging sonars, multibeam echosounders. With the advancements in GIS and emergence of remotely sensed data new approaches for bathymetry extraction were developed. However, despite a high motivation to obtain bathymetric information for small lakes from remotely sensed data, there is a lack of reliable methods that can be implemented under various climate conditions and on a wide scale. In this paper several remote-sensing-based methods for bathymetry mapping of small lakes are discussed. The new Ice, Cloud, and land Elevation Satellite-2 (ICESat-2) data was used to extract bathymetric information on three small lakes of Kazakhstan. The assessment of ICESat-2 for lake bathymetry extraction was conducted using field measurements as the validation data.