Coupling remote sensing, in situ observation and modelling for process understanding in lakes
Lakes are often naively represented on maps as uniform blue areas. This visualization cannot account for the rich spatial and temporal dynamic behavior of lake ecosystems. Past researches have often focused on vertical fluxes and structures. Today’s additional challenge is to quantify horizontal transport and mixing processes. New instrumentation, such as high frequency in situ data platforms, remote sensing and computational resources enable the investigation of the temporal evolution of the environment’s spatial heterogeneity. Yet, environmental scientists still rarely manage to handle in a global integrated way these data for their studies. Over the last decades, different research communities have focused on this problem with different approaches and information sources. The current challenge is to couple those sources, consisting of in situ measurements, remote sensing data, hydrodynamic and biological models, in order to provide timely, scientifically credible, and policy-relevant environmental information. The coupling approach envisaged here implies mutual feedback mechanisms between those three information sources. Examples of the benefit of the mutual feedback between information sources are discussed here.
Host: Georgiy Kirillin