Investigating Hydroclimatic Variables Trends on the Natural Lakes of Western Greece Using Earth Observation Data

Abstract

Expected global climate change is allegedly becoming more intense, and the impacts on water resources are being tracked in various hydroclimatic regimes. The present research investigates a hydrologically important area of Greece, where four natural lakes are concentrated. It aims to quantify any potential long-term trends in lake water area, precipitation, and temperature timeseries. Water area timeseries spanning four decades are estimated by the mNDWI from Landsat satellite imagery and used as an index of each lake’s water storage. Precipitation and temperature measurements are obtained from the open access datasets Hydroscope and ERA5-Land, respectively. All of the timeseries were tested seasonally and annually with the Pettitt and Mann–Kendal tests for statistically significant breakpoints and trends detection. No timeseries analysis resulted in a statistically significant (at 0.05 or 0.1 levels) annual or seasonal trend. The hydroclimatic regime over the past forty years in western Greece is found to have been relatively stable. Land use was also assessed to have been relatively unchanging, converging to the overall stability of the local water regime. However, the findings of this research should not be interpreted as a reassurance against climate change, but as a call to further research for the detailed regional and local assessment of climate change and hydroclimatic variability with acknowledged statistical approaches.