Water Temperature of Lakes in the Conterminous U.S. Using the Landsat 8 Analysis Ready Dataset Raster Images from 2013-2023

This data release contains lake and reservoir water surface temperature summary statistics calculated from Landsat 8 Analysis Ready Dataset (ARD) images available within the Conterminous United States (CONUS) from 2013-2023. All zip files within this data release contain nested directories using .parquet files to store the data. The file example_script_for_using_parquet.R contains example code for using the R arrow package (Richardson and others, 2024) to open and query the nested .parquet files.

Limitations with this dataset include:

All biases inherent to the Landsat Surface Temperature product are retained in this dataset which can produce unrealistically high or low estimates of water temperature. This is observed to happen, for example, in cases with partial cloud coverage over a waterbody.
Some waterbodies are split between multiple Landsat Analysis Ready Data tiles or orbit footprints. In these cases, multiple waterbody-wide statistics may be reported - one for each data tile. The deepest point values will be extracted and reported for tile covering the deepest point. A total of 947 waterbodies are split between multiple tiles (see the multiple_tiles = “yes” column of "site_id_tile_hv_crosswalk.csv").
Temperature data were not extracted from satellite images with more than 90% cloud cover.
Temperature data represents skin temperature at the water surface and may differ from temperature observations from below the water surface.

Potential methods for addressing limitations with this dataset:


Identifying and removing unrealistic temperature estimates:

Calculate total percentage of cloud pixels over a given waterbody as: percent_cloud_pixels = wb_dswe9_pixels/(wb_dswe9_pixels + wb_dswe1_pixels), and filter percent_cloud_pixels by a desired percentage of cloud coverage.
Remove lakes with a limited number of water pixel values available (wb_dswe1_pixels < 10)
Filter waterbodies where the deepest point is identified as water (dp_dswe = 1)


Handling waterbodies split between multiple tiles:

These waterbodies can be identified using the "site_id_tile_hv_crosswalk.csv" file (column multiple_tiles = “yes”). A user could combine sections of the same waterbody by spatially weighting the values using the number of water pixels available within each section (wb_dswe1_pixels). This should be done with caution, as some sections of the waterbody may have data available on different dates.



"year_byscene=XXXX.zip" – includes temperature summary statistics for individual waterbodies and the deepest points (the furthest point from land within a waterbody) within each waterbody by the scene_date (when the satellite passed over). Individual waterbodies are identified by the National Hydrography Dataset (NHD) permanent_identifier included within the site_id column. Some of the .parquet files with the _byscene datasets may only include one dummy row of data (identified by tile_hv="000-000"). This happens when no tabular data is extracted from the raster images because of clouds obscuring the image, a tile that covers mostly ocean with a very small amount of land, or other possible. An example file path for this dataset follows: year_byscene=2023/tile_hv=002-001/part-0.parquet

"year=XXXX.zip" – includes the summary statistics for individual waterbodies and the deepest points within each waterbody by the year (dataset=annual), month (year=0, dataset=monthly), and year-month (dataset=yrmon). The year_byscene=XXXX is used as input for generating these summary tables that aggregates temperature data by year, month, and year-month. Aggregated data is not available for the following tiles: 001-004, 001-010, 002-012, 028-013, and 029-012, because these tiles primarily cover ocean with limited land, and no output data were generated. An example file path for this dataset follows: year=2023/dataset=lakes_annual/tile_hv=002-001/part-0.parquet

"example_script_for_using_parquet.R" – This script includes code to download zip files directly from ScienceBase, identify HUC04 basins within desired landsat ARD grid tile, download NHDplus High Resolution data for visualizing, using the R arrow package to compile .parquet files in nested directories, and create example static and interactive maps.

"nhd_HUC04s_ingrid.csv" – This cross-walk file identifies the HUC04 watersheds within each Landsat ARD Tile grid.

"site_id_tile_hv_crosswalk.csv" - This cross-walk file identifies the site_id (nhdhr_{permanent_identifier}) within each Landsat ARD Tile grid. This file also includes a column (multiple_tiles) to identify site_id's that fall within multiple Landsat ARD Tile grids.

"lst_grid.png" – a map of the Landsat grid tiles labelled by the horizontal – vertical ID.