Monitoring Surface Water Dynamics in the Prairie Pothole Region Using Dual-Polarised Sentinel-1 SAR Time Series

Abstract. The North American Prairie Pothole Region (PPR) represents a large system of wetlands with great importance for biodiversity, water storage and flood management. Knowledge of seasonal and inter-annual surface water dynamics in the PPR is important for understanding the functionality of these wetland ecosystems and the changing degree of hydrologic connectivity between them. Optical sensors have been widely used to calibrate and validate hydrological models of wetland dynamics. Yet, they are often limited by their temporal resolution and cloud cover, especially in the case of flood events. Synthetic aperture radar (SAR) sensors, such as the ones on board the Copernicus Sentinel-1 mission, can potentially overcome such limitations. However, water extent retrieval from SAR data is often affected by environmental factors, such as wind on water surfaces. Hence, for reliably monitoring water extent over longer time periods robust retrieval methods are required. The aim of this study was to develop a robust approach for classifying open water extent dynamics in the PPR and to analyse the obtained time series covering the entire available Sentinel-1 observation period from 2015 to 2020 in the light of ancillary data. Open water in prairie potholes was classified by fusing dual-polarised Sentinel-1 data and high-resolution topographical information using a Bayesian framework. The approach was tested for a study area in North Dakota. The resulting surface water maps were validated using high-resolution airborne optical imagery. For the observation period, the total water area, the number of water bodies and the median area per water body were computed. The validation of the retrieved water maps yielded producer’s accuracies between 84 % and 95 % for calm days and between 74 % and 88 % on windy days. User’s accuracies were above 98 % in all cases, indicating a very low occurrence of false positives due to the constraints introduced by topographical information. Surface water dynamics showed strong intra-annual dynamics especially in the case of small water bodies (< 1 ha). Water area and number of small water bodies decreased from spring throughout summer when evaporation rates in the PPR are typically high. Larger water bodies showed a more stable behaviour during most years. During the extremely wet period between the autumn of 2019 and mid-2020, however, the dynamics of both small and large water bodies changed markedly. While a larger number of small water bodies was encountered, which remained stable throughout the wet period, also the area of larger water bodies increased, partly due to merging of smaller adjacent water bodies. However, the area covered by small water bodies was more stable than the area covered by large water bodies. This suggests that large potholes released water faster via the drainage network, while small potholes released water mainly to the atmosphere via evaporation. The results demonstrate the potential of Sentinel-1 data for high-resolution monitoring of prairie wetlands. Limitations exist related to wind inhibiting correct water extent retrieval and due to the rather low temporal resolution of 12 days over the PPR.