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Mississippi Delta and ponds
visualization of California rivers
Mississippi Delta taken by ASTER platform

Inland Waters

The Inland Waters dataset (ILW) provides data for lakes and other water bodies across the contiguous United States (CONUS) and Alaska. This dataset significantly reduces the processing effort required by end users and is a standardized community resource for lake and reservoir algorithm development and performance assessment. 

Data Centers

OB.DAAC

The data is provided for 15,450 CONUS waterbodies with a size of at least one 300 m pixel and over 2,300 resolvable lakes with sizes greater than three 300 m pixels. Alaska has 5,874 lakes resolvable lakes. ILW was developed in collaboration with the Cyanobacteria Assessment Network (CyAN). Additional inland water details and resources, including maps of resolvable lakes and additional inland water products, such as true color imagery, are available on the CyAN project page.

ILW is a times series containing 10 years of Medium Resolution Imaging Spectrometer (MERIS) (2002-2012) and Ocean and Land Colour Instrument (OLCI) from both Sentinel-3A (2016-present) and Sentinel-3B (2018-present). ILW includes Rayleigh-corrected top-of-atmosphere reflectance (ρs(λ); unitless) at 413, 443, 490, 510, 560, 620, 665, 681, 709, 754, and 885 nm and the Cyanobacteria Index (CIcyano; unitless) to estimate cyanobacteria concentrations. ILW provides daily, weekly, rolling 28-day, monthly, and seasonal files and consists of L2 files, L3-binned files, and L3 standard mapped images (SMI).

CONUS map showing the locations of ILW satellite resolvable lakes.

CONUS map showing the locations of ILW satellite resolvable lakes. Credit: OB.DAAC

The image above is a 7-day composite of CIcyano data where light tan represents land and the speckling of rainbow, gray, and black colors highlights both the location of inland resolvable lakes and the coastal areas where ILW data are available. The black offshore ocean area is not part of the ILW data set. The inset displays lake resolution at a more regional scale.

Related Instruments

Medium Resolution Imaging Spectrometer (MERIS) MERIS is a medium-spectral resolution imaging spectrometer on board Envisat-1, capable of sensing in the 390 nm to 1040 nm spectral range.
Ocean and Land Colour Instrument (OLCI) OLCI was developed in part to provide continuity with measurements made by the Medium Resolution Imaging Spectometer.