Improved land mask for satellite remote sensing of oceans and inland waters

Abstract

We present an improved medium (250 m) spatial resolution land mask based on augmenting earlier results of Mikelsons et al. (2021) to reflect recent changes in global water surface coverage. This land mask update is critical for remote sensing of coastal oceans and inland waters as this is the first step to properly identify water pixels from land pixels for satellite data processing. We show that clear-sky false color imagery derived for monthly and yearly time periods can be effectively used to identify changes to the surface water coverage. In addition, we also use Sentinel-2 satellite imagery to derive more accurate boundaries of new water bodies with complex geometries. We demonstrate improved coverage from satellite ocean color and inland water property retrievals with the improved land mask, including a range of new inland water bodies, as well as changes to the extent of the existing water bodies. We find that majority of inland water surface changes are directly linked to human activities and list the changes to water surface areas and approximate time periods for these water bodies. The improved land mask (Mikelsons and Wang, 2025) (https://doi.org/10.17632/9r93m9s7cw.2) can also be used in the remote sensing of terrestrial, atmospheric, and cryospheric property products.