Analysis of global satellite products for the Essential Climate Variable 'Lakes' in the LTER framework

The ESA CCI Lakes is a multi-disciplinary project (https://climate.esa.int/en/projects/lakes/) to exploit satellite data to create the largest and longest possible consistent, global record of lake climate variables: lake water level, extent, temperature, surface-leaving reflectance, and ice cover. The first version of the database includes 250 globally distributed lakes with temporal coverage ranging, depending on the variable, from 1992 up to 2019. The dataset is now growing to 2000 lakes and by next November the new version of satellite products will be accessible. In this study the potential of the dataset is being explored for different case studies (i.e. Mendota, Erken, Balaton, Iseo, Garda, Trasimeno, and Peipsi) as part of the Long-Term Ecosystem Research (LTER) network. Satellite products of chlorophyll-a, turbidity and lake surface temperature from 2002 to 2019 are compared and integrated with the corresponding in situ data in the LTER dataset. Time-series of satellite data are then explored to examine trends in the context of key meteo-climatic variables.