Analysis of long-term satellite products for the Essential Climate Variable 'Lakes' in the LTER framework

Lakes are integrators of environmental and climatic changes occurring within their contributing basins. Understanding the complex behaviour of lakes in a dynamic environment is essential for effective management of water resources and mitigation of climate change effects. The Lakes CCI project is a multi-disciplinary ESA (European Space Agency) funded project that aims to use satellite Earth Observation data to create the largest and longest possible global record of the five climate variables of lakes: lake water level, extent, temperature, surface-leaving reflectance and ice cover. The phase 1 version of the database covers 250 lakes distributed globally, while the phase 2 version is expected to expand to 2000 lakes. The temporal coverage varies depending on the parameter, with data ranging from 1992 to 2019. The potential of the dataset is explored for two Italian lakes and one Swedish lake: i) Trasimeno, a shallow eutrophic lake, ii) Garda, a deep subalpine oligotrophic lake, and iii) Erken, a shallow meso-eutrophic lake. These areas are a specific case study of the lakes CCI project included in the Long-Term Ecosystem Research (LTER) network. The obtained satellite products will be 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, comparing the effects of climate change in the two different geographic areas of northern and southern Europe.