Polar lake bathymetry retrieval from remote sensing data of the arctic coastal plain in Alaska

Bathymetry of lakes in the Arctic coastal plain plays an important role in understanding the regional geographical processes and environmental changes. Inversion of polar lake depth with remote sensing technique owns the advantage of rapidly processing large-scale data, but so far less research was done in Arctic. The aim of this article is to retrieve the bathymetry of shallow thaw lakes in the Arctic Coastal Plain of northern Alaska based on the multispectral remote sensing data. The inversion method proposed by Stumpf was inspected and verified. Then it was applied to retrieve the depth of 3 187 lakes distributed in the area of 16380 km ². Validation for the model was implemented via field measurements obtained from ship-borne sonar, and the MAE (mean absolute error) and RMSE (root mean square error) were 0.37 m and 0.54 m respectively. This method is suitable for bathymetric retrieval from remote sensing data of thousands of lakes in the study area. The spatial pattern of lake depth shows that depth of lake decreases from hill foot of Brooks to the coastline.