Development of high-resolution water body map using Satellite data 

Master(2016) Daiki Ikeshima

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All living creatures, including us humans, need water to live. The Earth is so called a planet of water. Large amount of of water in various conditions exists here. Out of that, the amount of surface water such as rivers or lakes accounts for only 0.01% of all the water on our planet. This denotes that surface water we can use easily is valuable. However, the detailed distribution of water on our planet is still unknown.

Objective of this research is to identify the location and size of surface water using satellite images. Here, we built global scale water body map by analyzing more than 30,000 images acquired by satellite, Landsat.    

This map separates Permanent Water Body, where water surface exist always, and Temporal Water Body, where water surface do not exist always. By means of revealing the accurate distribution of surface water, this map could be useful for natural hazard forecasting, such as flood disasters.