Water level changes in Swedish lake systems using pixel-specific Sentinel-1 phase change

Sweden has approximately 100,000 lakes covering roughly nine percent of the country’s surface area. These lakes are one of the important sources of fresh water for urban, industrial, and agricultural use, further providing a wide range of ecosystem services. In order to conserve and protect the lakes from the impacts of climate change, hydrologic monitoring should ideally be conducted in all of these lakes. However, it is almost impossible to gauge all of these lakes on a regular basis, due to economical and logistic constraints. Radar altimetry has been successfully used to obtain water levels from specific lakes; however, the technology can only be used in large lakes that are located precisely under the orbit of the satellite, thus excluding most Swedish lakes. We here develop a new procedure based on the application of differential interferometric synthetic aperture radar (DInSAR) on sequential image pairs with short temporal baseline to measure the water level of 36 lakes. We processed Sentinel-1 twin satellite data with 6-day revisiting intervals, pair by pair, from March 2019 to November 2019. In total, we constructed 41 interferograms considering only the pixels with coherence values greater than 0.2 in all interferograms to ensure consistent scattering and good coherence in all images. We found that the pixels located near tree trunks in flat areas or near steep cliffs in mountainous areas showed a steady phase change in all interferograms that could be converted to water level change. In some of these lakes, the water level changes derived from this methodology correlated well with the in-situ water level of the gauge stations provided by the Swedish Meteorological and Hydrological Institute. We believe that this methodology has good potential for monitoring water level data in small lakes that cannot be monitored by radar altimetry, and serves as evidence of the unknown potential of DInSAR to track hydrological changes in open water surfaces.