Integrating remotely sensed observations of surface water storage with climate forecast for freshwater management: report of senior researcher exchange April-May 2018

The India-UK Water Centre (IUKWC) promotes cooperation and collaboration between the complementary priorities of NERC-MoES water security research. This report presents an overview of research exchange undertaken by Dr Vimal Mishra (IIT, Gandhinagar) at Dr Harjinder Sembhi’s lab at University of Leicester, UK. The exchange focused largely on developing a methodology to estimate freshwater storage of lakes in India using the Multi Spectral Instrument (MSI) on European Space Agency’s Sentinel 2 mission. Remote sensing has successfully provided the solutions for monitoring water storage in large water bodies, however monitoring changes in storage in smaller water bodies (less than 100,000 m2) remains a challenge. This is mainly because of the coarser resolution achieved by many space-borne sensors. Tracking of storage changes in smaller water bodies can help to understand the risks of water availability, particularly in vulnerable regions, and provide critical information for stakeholders in decision making for freshwater management. This exchange visit aimed to develop a remote sensing based framework to monitor changes in water storage during the dry season in India in a selection of diverse climatic regions located in semi-arid areas of Gujarat and West Bengal. The exchange aimed to utilise long-term climate data records of land surface temperature, developed at the University of Leicester, as well as, novel high-spatial resolution observations from the Sentinel 2 mission.