Abstract:
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As a result of their sensitivity to climatic conditions, lakes have been described as sentinels of change. Recent developments in Earth Observation (EO) instruments such as MERIS (Medium-Spectral Resolution, Imaging Spectrometer) and AATSR (Advanced Along-Track Scanning Radiometer) from the European Space Agency's Envisat satellite platform have enabled the retrieval of a range of water quality determinands from lakes. This has resulted in the availability of expansive spatiotemporal datasets which simultaneously facilitate global assessment of environmental change and present new statistical challenges. GloboLakes is a 5 year UK (NERC) funded research programme investigating the state of lakes and their response to climatic and other environmental drivers of change. This project is investigating the coherence of water quality of lakes using EO data, at both a global and within lake scale. Functional clustering methods have been developed to identify clusters of lakes which are similar in terms of both trends and seasonal patterns. Considerations include dimensionality reduction, incorporation of retrieval error and dealing with discontinuities in time series.
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