EXTRACTION OF RIVERS AND LAKES ON TIBETAN PLATEAU BASED ON GOOGLE EARTH ENGINE

Abstract

Tibetan Plateau (TP) is the most abundant area of water resources and water energy resources in China. It is also the birthplace of the main rivers in Southeast Asia and plays an important strategic role. However, due to its remote location and complex topography, the observation of surface hydrometeorological elements is extremely scarce, which seriously restricts the understanding of the water cycle in this area. Using remote sensing images to extract rivers and lakes on TP can obtain a lot of valuable water resources information. However, the downloading and processing of remote sensing images is very time-consuming, especially the processing of remote sensing images with large-scale and long time series often involves hundreds of gigabytes of data, which requires a high level of personal computers and is inefficient. As a cloud platform dedicated to data processing and analysis of geoscience, Google Earth Engine(GEE) integrates many excellent remote sensing image processing algorithms. It does not need to download images and supports online remote sensing image processing, which greatly improves the output efficiency. Based on GEE, the monthly data of Yarlung Zangbo River at Nuxia Hydrological Station and the annual data of typical lakes were extracted and vectorized from the pre-processed Landsat series images. It was found that the area of Yarlung Zangbo River at Nuxia Hydrological Station varies periodically. The changing trend of typical lakes is also revealed.