Modeling 25 years of spatio-temporal surface water and inundation dynamics on large river basin scale using time series of Earth observation data
Abstract. The usage of time series of Earth observation (EO) data for analyzing and modeling surface water extent (SWE) dynamics across broad geographic regions provides important information for sustainable management and restoration of terrestrial surface water resources, which suffered alarming declines and deterioration globally. The main objective of this research was to model SWE dynamics from a unique, statistically validated Landsat-based time series (1986–2011) continuously through cycles of flooding and drying across a large and heterogeneous river basin, the Murray–Darling Basin (MDB) in Australia. We used dynamic linear regression to model remotely sensed SWE as a function of river flow and spatially explicit time series of soil moisture (SM), evapotranspiration (ET), and rainfall (P). To enable a consistent modeling approach across space, we modeled SWE dynamics separately for hydrologically distinct floodplain, floodplain-lake, and non-floodplain areas within eco-hydrological zones and 10