A new clustering method to generate training samples for supervised monitoring of long-term water surface dynamics using Landsat data through Google Earth Engine

Water resources are vital to the survival of living organisms and contribute substantially to the development of various sectors. Climatic diversity, topographic conditions, and uneven dis-tribution of surface water flows have made reservoirs one of the primary water supply resources in Iran. This study used Landsat 5, 7, and 8 data in Google Earth Engine (GEE) for supervised monitoring of surface water dynamics in the reservoir of eight Iranian dams (Karkheh, Karun-1, Karun-3, Karun-4, Dez, UpperGotvand, Zayanderud, and Golpayegan). A novel automated method was proposed for providing training samples based on an iterative K-means refinement procedure. The proposed method used the Function of the Mask (Fmask) initial water map to generate final training samples. Then, Support Vector Machines (SVM) and Random Forest (RF) models were trained with the generated samples and used for water mapping. Results demonstrated the satisfactory performance of the trained RF model with the samples of the proposed refinement procedure (with overall accuracies of 95.13%) in comparison to the trained RF with direct samples of Fmask initial water map (with overall accuracies of 78.91%), indicating the proposed approach’s success in producing training samples. The performance of three feature sets was also evaluated. Tasseled-Cap (TC) achieved higher overall accuracies than Spectral Indices (SI) and Principal Component Transformation of Image Bands (PCA). However, simultaneous use of all features (TC, SI, and PCA) boosted classification overall accuracy. Moreover, long-term surface water changes showed a downward trend in five study sites. Comparing the latest year’s water surface area (2021) with the maximum long-term extent showed that all study sites experienced a significant reduction (16–62%). Analysis of climate factors’ impacts also revealed that precipitation (0.51 ≤ R2 ≤ 0.79) was more correlated than the temperature (0.22 ≤ R2 ≤ 0.39) with water surface area changes.