Evaluation of urban lake evolution using Google Earth Engine - A case study of Wuhan, China

In recent decades, urban lakes have been constantly evolutionalized because of rapid urbanization, which may bring severe ecological and environmental consequences. Global satellite data that are accessible through Google Earth Engine are valuable for large-scale evaluation of the evolution of the urban lakes. This study introduced the evaluation of lakes in Wuhan area in China using Google Earth Engine. 23 major lakes in this city are analyzed using classification, morphological operators, and a water index model. All the analysis were done in Google Earth Engine. The result shows that the total surface areas of these major lakes in Wuhan had significantly decreased from1991 to 2013. This case also clearly show that Google Earth Engine could significantly facilitate the scientific discovery process by enabling fast batch analysis of large volume of satellite data without downloading and analyzing them locally.