Enhancing the temporal resolution of water levels from altimetry using D-InSAR: A case study of 10 Swedish Lakes

Abstract

Lakes provide societies and natural ecosystems with valuable services such as freshwater supply and flood control. Water level changes in lakes reflect their natural responses to climatic and anthropogenic stressors; however, their monitoring is costly due to installation and maintenance requirements. With its advanced hardware and computational capabilities, altimetry has become a popular alternative to conventional in-situ gauging, although subject to the temporal availability of altimetric observations. To further improve the temporal resolution of altimetric measurements, we here combine radar altimetry data with Differential Interferometric Synthetic Aperture Radar (D-InSAR), using ten lakes in Sweden as a testing platform. First, we use Sentinel-1A and Sentinel-1B SAR images to generate consecutive six-day baseline interferograms across 2019. Then, we accumulate the phase change of coherent pixels to construct the time series of InSAR-derived water level anomalies. Finally, we retrieve altimetric observations from Sentinel-3, estimate their mean and standard deviation, and apply them to the D-InSAR standardized anomalies. In this way, we build a water-level time series with more temporal observations. In general, we find a strong agreement between water level estimates from the combination of D-InSAR and Satellite Altimetry (DInSAlt) and in-situ observations in eight lakes (Concordance Correlation Coefficient - CCC >0.8) and moderate agreement in two lakes (CCC >0.57). The applicability of DInSAlt is limited to lakes with suitable conditions for double-bounce scattering, such as the presence of trees or marshes. The accuracy of the water level estimates depends on the quality of the altimetry observations and the lake's width. These findings are important considering the recently launched Surface Water and Ocean Topography (SWOT) satellite, whose capabilities could expand our methodology's geographical applicability and reduce its reliance on ground measurements.