We conducted rapid spatial surveys of surface water in six reservoirs (Lake Bonham, Lake Waco, Lake Arrowhead, Lake Brownwood, O.H. Ivie Lake, and Red Bluff Reservoir) between July 15-August 12, 2022 using methods similar to those of the Fast Limnology Automated Measurement (FLAMe) platform used in Crawford et al. (2015) and Loken et al. (2018). These surveys were timed concurrently with a Sentinel-2 satellite image acquisition except for Lake Brownwood which was within 24 hour (survey on August 6, 2022, satellite flyover on August 7, 2022). Turbidity measured along the boat path corresponded positively with normalized difference turbidity index, NDTI (Lacaux et al. 2007) using similar methods as Powers et al. (2023). Secchi depth was predicted along the boat path using the relationship between log(turbidity) and log(Secchi) determined from all the reservoirs in the 2012 and 2017 National Lakes Assessment. Dominant wavelength was calculated using chromaticity analysis as described in Lehmann et al. (2018) and Yang et al. (2022) along the boat path, for longitudinal transects, and for the whole system. The whole system calculation of dominant wavelength and NDTI was conducted in Google Earth Engine (GEE) where the Level-2 Sentinel-2, ee.ImageCollection("COPERNICUS/S2_SR_HARMONIZED") collection was combined with the Sentinel-2 Cloud Probability product, ee.ImageCollection("COPERNICUS/S2_CLOUD_PROBABILITY") to exclude clouds. The modified normalized difference water index (Buma et al. 2018) was used to mask out non-water pixels. Cloud-free, water pixels were clipped within the lake polygon boundaries and exported as TIFs to conduct analysis in R. Within R, bounding boxes were used to separate reservoir arms from reservoir main bodies determined by a 4 meter threshold. Means were taken for clarity and color data variables (measured turbidity, predicted Secchi depth, NDTI, and dominant wavelength) for each zone within each lake (n = 14). A two-way analysis of variance (variable~zone + system) and Tukey's post-hoc analysis was conducted to test for differences. Level 1 Top-of-Atmosphere images were also downloaded for the lakes and dates of interest from the Copernicus Data Space Ecosystem and ACOLITE atmospheric correction was applied to produce both Level-2 surface reflectance and Level-2 water products. Points along the boat path and the longitudinal transects from dam to river arm were queried within R for both the cloud masked product from GEE and the ACOLITE L2W. Band values were extracted from using the extract function from the terra package (Hjimans 2024).
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