"Global Monitoring of Inland Water Surface With GEDI Geo Big Data Using Google Earth Engine: Preliminary Analysis, Potentials and Issues

Inland surface water is the source for about two-thirds of the freshwater consumed by humans and a key component of the hydrological cycle, thus its monitoring is fundamental to understand climatic changes and their impact on humans and biodiversity. The availability of new global data is thus crucial to carry out this monitoring at a global scale, provided that a proper assessment is performed to evaluate its accuracy. In this respect, Google Earth Engine (GEE) is known as a reliable, and real-time cloud-based computation platform, capable of integrating a high variety of up-to-date geospatial datasets with powerful analysis tools. GEE has recently added the Global Ecosystem Dynamics Investigation (GEDI) dataset [1,2] to its already wide archive. The GEDI dataset is a geo big data archive of laser-ranging observations of the Earth’s surface collected by a LiDAR instrument mounted onboard the International Space Station. This work focuses on a preliminary analysis of GEDI water level data for inland water surface monitoring, with the specific goal of outliers detection and removal. The effectiveness of the procedure is tested on some lakes where a ground truth constituted by continuous hydrometric water levels is available