International Journal of Digital Earth

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A fully automatic and high-accuracy surface water

mapping framework on Google Earth Engine using
Landsat time-series

Linwei Yue, Baoguang Li, Shuang Zhu, Qiangqiang Yuan & Huanfeng Shen

To cite this article: Linwei Yue, Baoguang Li, Shuang Zhu, Qiangqiang Yuan & Huanfeng Shen
(2023) A fully automatic and high-accuracy surface water mapping framework on Google Earth
Engine using Landsat time-series, International Journal of Digital Earth, 16:1, 210-233, DOI:
10.1080/17538947.2023.2166606

To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/17538947.2023.2166606

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INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF DIGITAL EARTH
2023, VOL. 16, NO. 1, 210–233
https://doi.org/10.1080/17538947.2023.2166606

RESEARCH ARTICLE

A fully automatic and high-accuracy surface water mapping

framework on Google Earth Engine using Landsat time-series
Linwei Yuea,b, Baoguang Lia, Shuang Zhua,b, Qiangqiang Yuanc and Huanfeng Shen d

a
School of Geography and Information Engineering, China University of Geosciences, Wuhan, People’s Republic of
China; bNational Engineering Research Center of Geographic Information System, China University of Geosciences,
Wuhan, People’s Republic of China; cSchool of Geodesy and Geomatics, Wuhan University, Wuhan, People’s
Republic of China; dSchool of Resources and Environmental Science, Wuhan University, Wuhan, People’s Republic
of China

ABSTRACT ARTICLE HISTORY

Efficient and continuous monitoring of surface water is essential for water Received 10 June 2022
resource management. Much effort has been devoted to the task of water Accepted 5 January 2023
mapping based on remote sensing images. However, few studies have
KEYWORDS
fully considered the diverse spectral properties of water for the Water mapping; automatic
collection of reference samples in an automatic manner. Moreover, training samples; temporal
water area statistics are sensitive to the satellite image observation correction; Google Earth
quality. This study aims to develop a fully automatic surface water Engine
mapping framework based on Google Earth Engine (GEE) with a
supervised random forest classifier. A robust scheme was built to
automatically construct training samples by merging the information
from multi-source water occurrence products. The samples for
permanent and seasonal water were mapped and collected separately,
so that the supplement of seasonal samples can increase the spectral
diversity of the sample space. To reduce the uncertainty of the derived
water occurrences, temporal correction was applied to repair the
classification maps with invalid observations. Extensive experiments
showed that the proposed method can generate reliable samples and
produce good-quality water mapping results. Comparative tests
indicated that the proposed method produced water maps with a
higher quality than the index-based detection methods, as well as the
GSWD and GLAD datasets.

1. Introduction
Surface water resources play a significant role in the sustainable development of aquatic and terres-
trial ecosystems, and also human society (Vörösmarty et al. 2010; Wood et al. 2011). With the
ongoing global climate change and intensified human activities, the spatial and temporal distri-
bution of surface water has undergone drastic changes (Xu, Cheng, and Gun 2022). As a result,
the efficient and continuous monitoring of surface water dynamics has become essential for
water resource management and protection.
Satellite remote sensing has been the most popular technique for open surface water extraction,
especially at national and global scales. In terms of water detection methods, most of the existing

CONTACT Shuang Zhu zhushuang@cug.edu.cn School of Geography and Information Engineering, China University of
Geosciences, Wuhan, Hubei 430074, People’s Republic of China; National Engineering Research Center of Geographic Information
System, China University of Geosciences, Wuhan, Hubei 430074, People’s Republic of China
Supplemental data for this article can be accessed online at https://doi.org/10.1080/17538947.2023.2166606.
© 2023 The Author(s). Published by Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group
This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/),
which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
 INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF DIGITAL EARTH 211

studies have used optical images as the data source and exploited the distinguishing optical prop-
erties of water pixels in the sensor wavebands (Bukata et al. 2018). This can be generally
implemented in either an unsupervised or supervised manner. The unsupervised methods are
widely used, given their easy implementation and computational efficiency. However, they always
require thresholds, for which the optimal values can vary in different regions. Moreover, the choice
among the different water extraction indices is another challenge (Fisher, Flood, and Danaher 2016;
Zou et al. 2018). The supervised classification methods use labeled water and non-water samples to
train a classifier (e.g. random forest (RF)), and generate the classification results using the trained
model. The supervised methods can achieve a relatively high accuracy in surface mapping appli-
cations and have good adaptability (Li and Xu 2021; Mueller et al. 2016). However, the accuracy
of the supervised classification relies on the quality of the training sample sets. In most of the exist-
ing works, the researchers have used manually collected samples for training the classifiers. How-
ever, the labeling process is labor-intensive and subjective, and the spatial and temporal distribution
of the training samples can introduce uncertainty into the classification results.
Along with the many water detection methods, researchers have also generated surface water
mapping products for the analysis of long-term changes. The Google Earth Engine cloud comput-
ing platform combines a multi-petabyte catalog of satellite imagery and geospatial datasets with pla-
netary-scale analysis capabilities (Wu 2020; Amani et al. 2019; Markos, Sims, and Giuliani 2022),
which promoted the possibility of generating global-scale and high-resolution water dynamics data-
sets (Gorelick et al. 2017). For example, Pekel et al. (2016) produced the 30-m Global Surface Water
Dataset (GSWD) from 1984 to 2020, which documents the distribution and changes in global sur-
face water. The other representative surface water product is the 30-m global inland water dynamics
maps for 1999–2021 released by the Global Land Analysis and Discovery (GLAD) laboratory
(referred to as the GLAD product hereafter) (Pickens et al. 2020). However, both studies involved
the collection of large amounts of manually labeled training samples for the classification. Further-
more, open access to the data and codes used in these works is not yet available.
Based on these facts, a cost-effective and high-accuracy surface water extraction framework is
still necessary for the large-scale monitoring of surface water extent and changes. For large-scale
applications, there are two major issues that need to be addressed. Firstly, it is necessary to collect
enough samples representing the diverse water properties. With the effort made in the previous
studies, the multi-source surface water mapping products with long time series can provide
some useful information. Recently, Li and Xu (2021) attempted to automatically select training
samples from the GSWD dataset for surface water mapping. However, the training samples in
this work were collected from a single dataset, while the random selection and outlier removal pro-
cessing can fail in areas with poor-quality source data. Moreover, the water pixels with different
temporal characteristics were treated equally. Among the water pixels, the reflection spectrum of
seasonal water pixels distributed within shallow inundated areas can be partly affected by the
reflected signals from the underlying/neighboring land or a high concentration of suspended matter
and phytoplankton in the water (Campos, Sillero, and Brito 2012), which are easily misclassified.
Therefore, for the extraction of water samples, the key issue is to consider the dynamic variations
of the water areas and spectral properties. Furthermore, the statistics of water area (e.g. the water
occurrence) are highly sensitive to the observation quality of the satellite remote sensing images,
which can be easily contaminated by cloud and shadow. This leads to inconsistency among the stat-
istics of the multiple water datasets for different periods. Moreover, cloud contamination could lead
to underestimated water surface areas, even that monthly averaging operation was conducted (Zhao
and Gao 2018; Zhang et al. 2020).
To address the above two issues, we aimed to develop a fully automatic GEE-based surface water
mapping framework based on a supervised RF classifier. Firstly, we built a robust scheme to auto-
matically construct training samples by merging the information among the multi-source water
occurrence products. The samples for potentially permanent and seasonal water were mapped
and collected separately, so that the supplement of seasonal samples can increase the spectral
212 L. YUE ET AL.

diversity of the sample space. The obtained training samples were then fed into the RF classifier to
obtain the water mapping results. Secondly, to reduce the influence of the invalid observations, an
automatic correction method for the contaminated images was introduced into the proposed fra-
mework, to repair the classification results (Zhao and Gao 2018). The idea behind the correction
method is to combine the uncontaminated part of the water area in the images and the temporal
water occurrence statistics, to infer the distribution of the contaminated water pixels. Lastly, this
study provides an open-access, fully automatic, and scale-adaptive GEE-based monitoring tool
for the tracking of highly dynamic water information.

2. Study area and data

2.1. Study area
The distribution of surface water in China is characterized as extremely uneven and highly
dynamic (Zhang et al. 2020). Therefore, to assess the robustness of the proposed method, we
selected five typical sites in China with varied climate, topography, and urbanization conditions
(Regions A–E, in Figure 1). Regions A and B are located in northern China, where the precipi-
tation is much less than in the humid southern regions. As a result, the surface water resources
are relatively sparsely distributed in these regions. Region C is part of the Wuhan urban agglom-
eration located in the middle reaches of the Yangtze River, where abundant lakes and drainage
systems are found. Region D lies near the Pearl River estuary and belongs to the Pearl River
Delta urban agglomeration. Both Regions C and D represent the southern regions in China,
with abundant water resources, dense artificial land surfaces, and high precipitation in the wet
seasons (i.e. spring and summer). Comparatively, Region E lies in the northern part of the Tibetan
Plateau, with low population, where the changes of the water resources are mainly due to climate
change. In this area, there are several large lakes that are distinct from the neighboring land areas.
However, this high-altitude area is frequently covered by cloud, which brings difficulty to the
accurate mapping of long-term surface water dynamics. Some detailed information about the
study sites is presented in Table S1.

Figure 1. Overview of the five study sites in China.

 INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF DIGITAL EARTH 213

2.2. Data
2.2.1. Landsat archives
In this study, we incorporated the Landsat 5 Thematic Mapper (TM), Landsat 7 Enhanced The-
matic Mapper Plus (ETM+), and Landsat 8 Operational Land Imager (OLI) surface reflectance pro-
ducts from 1 January 1999 to 31 December 2020 covering the five study sites. All the available image
scenes were used for the surface water mapping and occurrence statistics, regardless of the contami-
nation by cloud, shadow, and data voids. The use of the contaminated images can increase the
potential information for water mapping (Yao et al. 2019), while the processing of the contaminated
pixels was further implemented with quality assessment (Section 3.1) and a temporal correction
algorithm (Section 3.4). All the data were accessed and processed using the GEE platform.

2.2.2. GSWD and GLAD products

Two comprehensive global surface products were used in this study to extract the training samples
and act as reference data for the temporal correction of the contaminated information. The GSWD
product is a 30-m spatial resolution global surface water dataset released by the Joint Research
Centre (JRC) (Pekel et al. 2016). The product records the spatial and temporal distribution of sur-
face water from 1984 to 2020. In this study, we used the surface water occurrence (SWO), yearly
water history (YWH) datasets and monthly water history (MWH) from GSWD. The SWO dataset
gives the long-term frequency of where water was present on the Earth’s surface from March 1984
to December 2020, with the values ranging from 0 to 100. The YWH dataset provides information
on the intra-annual seasonality of water areas over the past 3.7 decades, where the pixels over the
globe are classified as no observations, not water, seasonal water, and permanent water, based on
the monthly water maps throughout the year. The MWH dataset records water detection results
at monthly scales, and each pixel is classified as invalid, non-water or water, respectively.
Recently, the GLAD laboratory released a new 30-m global surface water dataset (i.e. the GLAD
product) (Pickens et al. 2020). This dataset was generated from all the Landsat 5, 7, and 8 images
acquired from 1999 to 2021. The annual water percent (AWP) dataset from GLAD was used in our
study, which provides the percentage of water presence for the valid observations to represent the
intra-annual variation of water extent throughout a year. For this dataset, the ratio of
water/(water + land) per season was first counted with the number of valid observations, and
the average of the seasons with enough data was used to obtain the AWP.

2.2.3. Manually labeled samples

Manually collected samples were used to assess the accuracy of the obtained classification results.
The reference water and non-water samples for the validation were produced from the Landsat
monthly image archives at an annual scale in 2000, 2005, 2010, 2015, and 2020, respectively. The
five-year maximum water maps of GSWD-YWH are merged to obtain the union set, and determine
the extent of water and non-water stratums. Specifically, the image with the lowest cloud cover was
selected, and the water and non-water pixels were then visually identified from the valid pixels (i.e.
those pixels with no cloud or shadow cover) using high-resolution Google Earth imagery as auxili-
ary information. If all the images in one month were covered with a high percentage (>70%) of
cloud, the images were abandoned. At each year scale, 1000 control points were collected for
each study region, where the sample sizes allocated to water and non-water stratums were approxi-
mately proportional to the area of each category calculated based on water and non-water stratums
defined. In the cases where area proportion of water was less than 10% (e.g. Region B), the sample
size for water class was set as 10% of the total number. The specific information about the sample
allocation was presented in Table S2.
In total, 5000 manually labeled samples were collected for the independent validation for each
study site. The reference samples were distributed all over the study sites (see Figure 5), covering
permanent water pixels located in the central parts of large lakes and reservoirs, seasonal water
214 L. YUE ET AL.

pixels distributed along the borders of water bodies, and non-water pixels belonging to different
land-cover types. In Table S2, we also showed the seasonal characteristics of water samples,
where the extent of permanent and seasonal water area was determined based on the GSWD-
YWH data.

3. Method
The automatic processing flow for the surface water mapping in this study was shown in Figure 2.
Firstly, the available images were preprocessed with the invalid pixels masked (Section 3.1). The
water and non-water samples were then automatically selected from the image archives, integrating
information from the GSWD and GLAD water occurrence datasets, to construct the training sets
(Section 3.2). The masked images and the labeled training samples were used to train the RF clas-
sifier for surface water extraction in a supervised manner (Section 3.3). To deal with the potential
invalid pixels, the per-scene classification results obtained by the trained RF model were repaired
based on the temporal information inferred from the GSWD-SWO statistics (Sections 3.4). The
water occurrence maps can be then derived (Section 3.5).

3.1. Data preprocessing

The surface reflectance products from the Landsat 5, 7, and 8 satellites were used in this study,
which have been processed with radiometric calibration, atmospheric and geometric correction.
The extra necessary processing for the images included masking of the low-quality observations,
e.g. the pixels contaminated by cloud, cloud shadow, snow/ice, and terrain shadow. Firstly, the
Quality Assessment band of each Landsat image was used to identify the poor-quality observations
(Zhu, Wang, and Woodcock 2015). To reduce the effects of topographic shadows with a similar low
reflectance to water pixels, the topographic shadows were further masked using the SRTM DEM
V3, along with the azimuth and zenith angles for each scene (Zou et al. 2018). This was
implemented using the ee.Terrain.hillShadow tool on the GEE platform. All the detected low-qual-
ity pixels were masked as invalid values, which were excluded from the subsequent training sample
construction and water detection process.

3.2. Automatic training sample construction

The key issue for accurate surface water mapping is to construct representative training samples
composed of labeled water and non-water pixels. However, this is a challenging task, due to the het-
erogenous spectral characteristics of water bodies. To capture sufficient water samples with diverse
reflection spectra, it is necessary to extract samples from multi-temporal images, due to the highly
dynamic nature of water areas. As the detection errors for mapping seasonal water mainly influence
the accuracy, the samples should cover both permanent and seasonal water pixels. With the succes-
sive release of water datasets, there is now a chance to automatically extract training sample sets
from the existing water maps. Nevertheless, the accuracy of the water mapping results for the
water products differs with the different data and processing flows employed. Based on these
facts, we propose a robust scheme for the automatic construction of training samples by integrating
information from multiple water mapping datasets in this study, as shown in Figure 3.
Firstly, an initial training sample set was generated by merging the corresponding classes pro-
vided by the GSWD-YWH and GLAD-AWP datasets to obtain the extent of three water types,
i.e. permanent water, seasonal water, and non-water. Before this, the water percent values of the
GLAD-AWP dataset needed to be converted to labels of water types that were consistent with
the GSWD-YWH dataset. We adopted the thresholds to distinguish the annual water occurrence
(denoted as Fw hereafter) into permanent water (Fw ≥ 0.75), seasonal water
(0.25 ≤ Fw , 0.75), and non-water (Fw , 0.25) areas (Zou et al. 2017). It should be noted that
 INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF DIGITAL EARTH 215

Figure 2. Flowchart of the automatic surface water mapping framework.

the criteria used to define the seasonal characteristics are different for the GSWD and GLAD data-
sets. This is because the JRC use the monthly composite water map to generate the GSWD-YWH
dataset, where seasonal water is defined as being covered by water for 1–11 months of the year. In
contrast, the GLAD-AWP dataset denotes the seasonally normalized percentage of water obser-
vations among all the clear observations each year. The statistics are difficult to be treated identically
due to their different temporal scales. However, our aim here is to determine a pixel set where high-
accuracy training samples can be selected from, rather than extracting the complete extent of water
dynamics. Therefore, the intersection of these two datasets corresponding to the three water types
were generated as the source of training samples. This meant that the pixels could be indicated as
being potential samples of permanent water/non-water only if the pixels were identified as perma-
nent water/non-water for both the GSWD-YWH and GLAD-AWP datasets. In this way, samples
for permanent water and non-water could be generated with random selection from the yearly
image sets masked by the combination map. About 500 potentially permanent water and 3000
non-water pixels were randomly selected for each year, and the initial training datasets were con-
structed at a five-year interval for 1999–2020.
For the seasonal water, the yearly merged masks were overlaid on the collected image archives
for each year. For each year, 500 multi-temporal samples were then randomly selected from the
masked seasonal water areas. Due to the seasonal dynamics, these samples needed to be classified
216 L. YUE ET AL.

Figure 3. Automatic construction of training samples based on the multiple water occurrence products.

as either water or non-water pixels depending on the specific spectral shape. Therefore, we used a k-
means clustering algorithm constrained by the preliminary sample sets for the permanent water and
non-water areas, to classify the seasonal samples. It means that the clustering centers for k-means
algorithm were initialized by the samples for the permanent water and non-water types, respect-
ively. In this way, the seasonal samples were finally clustered into water and non-water categories,
based on the spectral similarities. To ensure the accuracy of the sample sets, the k-means clustering
algorithm was again applied to the whole sample set, and two clusters (i.e. water and non-water
type) were obtained with randomly assigned initial clustering centers. The results obtained in
these two different ways were compared with each other, and the points with inconsistent categories
were labeled as potential outliers. The outliers were then removed, and the final sample set was gen-
erated. The goal of clustering process is to incorporate an additional proportion of potentially sea-
sonal water samples with diverse spectral properties of surface water in the model training process.

3.3. Water detection with the random forest classifier

The extraction of the surface water area from the remote sensing images was implemented in a
supervised manner, with RF employed as the classifier. As a popular statistical classifier, RF has
been widely used for surface water mapping and change monitoring, and has showed stable per-
formances (Li and Xu 2021; Rodriguez-Galiano et al. 2012; Tulbure et al. 2016). RF is an integrated
predictor that builds a set of decision trees, which can effectively reduce the single model’s sensi-
tivity to data noise and anomalies (Breiman 2001).
 INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF DIGITAL EARTH 217

To better separate the spectral characteristics, 13 variables related to spectral properties of water
and vegetation cover were selected as feature bands for training the RF classifier in this study: six
spectral bands (blue, green, red, NIR, SWIR-1, SWIR-2) and seven spectral indices (Table S3) (i.e.
Normalized Difference Water Index (NDWI) (McFeeters 1996), Modified Normalized Difference
Water Index (mNDWI) (H. Xu 2006), Automatic Water Extraction Index (AWEI) (Feyisa et al.
2014), Enhanced Water Index (EWI) (Yan, Zhang, and Zhang 2007), City Water Index (CWI)
(Yang et al. 2018), Normalized Difference Vegetation Index (NDVI) (Tucker 1979) and Enhanced
Vegetation Index (EVI)) (Huete et al. 1997; Huete et al. 2002). The input sets to the RF model were
made up of all the feature variables, and the model was trained with the automatically constructed
samples as the labels. The well-trained RF model was then used to classify each Landsat image. With
the fully automatic processing flow of the sample reconstruction, the classifier can be flexibly
trained on either a regional or global scale. In this study, we performed the training and testing pro-
cess for each region (approximately 1° × 1° tile). The number of trees for RF model was set as 150
empirically.

3.4. Temporal correction of contaminated pixels

Optical remote sensing images are often contaminated by cloud, cloud shadow, and topographic
shadow. Most studies discard the contaminated images or pixels, but this can lead to bias in the
analysis of the spatial and temporal distribution of surface water resources (Pekel et al. 2016; Pick-
ens et al. 2020; Zou et al. 2018). Moreover, the different methods employed for the detection and
processing of invalid pixels cause inconsistency among the various water products. Following the
idea of Zhao and Gao (2018), we optimized the water mapping results through correction of the
contaminated pixels based on the water occurrence statistics. Instead of processing the monthly
water coverage for the reservoirs from the GSWD product, we applied the correction method to
repair the scene-based classification results.
To extract the water extent, the collected images were first classified into three categories, i.e.
water, non-water, and invalid observations. For each scene, the invalid pixels were then reclassified
as water or non-water types, based on the temporal clues. The general idea behind the method of
Zhao and Gao (2018) is to introduce the long-term water occurrence information to infer the cat-
egory of the contaminated pixels. In this study, we employed the GSWD-SWO data to provide the
water occurrence information during the 37-year period (1984–2020). The basic assumption was
that the contaminated pixels were likely covered by water when their water occurrence values
Oci were greater than the occurrence threshold determined by the uncontaminated water pixels
within the data tile. Specifically, the GSWD-SWO data were cropped using the mask generated
by the classified water area for each image, and the histogram of the cropped occurrence image
was generated. The histogram shows the count of pixels corresponding to each water occurrence
value. The average value of the pixel counts (Pwc ) for regional water area was then calculated,
and the count threshold (Twc ) was set as the product of Pwc and a weighting factor (a = 0.17), fol-
lowing the instructions provided in Zhao and Gao (2018). After the count threshold was deter-
mined, the occurrence threshold (Two ) could then be identified as the smallest water occurrence
with pixel count larger or equal to Twc . As a result, the invalid pixels with a water occurrence greater
than the threshold were identified as water (Oi ≥ Two ); otherwise, the pixels were reclassified as the
non-water category. Finally, an enhanced classification image was produced after temporal correc-
tion of the invalid pixels.
For some cases without enough valid observations in a scene, the method can fail due to the inac-
curate threshold obtained. Therefore, if the estimated occurrence threshold is out of the range of 5–
75%, the correction process was not applied to the classification results for the purpose of quality
control. Moreover, for the images with good quality (more than 95% valid observations) and
extreme contamination (less than 5% valid observations), the correction processing was
meaningless.
218 L. YUE ET AL.

3.5. Calculation of water occurrence

Water occurrence represents the occurrence of surface water for a pixel within a given period. The
water occurrence can be obtained from the multi-temporal classified water body maps, and denotes
the ratio of the number of pixels identified as water to the total number of observations. For the
scenes with correction of contaminated pixels, they are counted into the sum of the total obser-
vations. Based on the water occurrence values, the pixels were then classified into permanent
water (Fw ≥ 0.75), seasonal water (0.25 ≤ Fw , 0.75), and non-water (Fw , 0.25) categories in
this study.

3.6. Accuracy evaluation

In the validation stage, the accuracy of the automatically collected samples and the accuracy of the
water classification results were evaluated based on the corresponding validation sets. The accu-
racies of both the samples and overall classification were calculated based on confusion matrices
with cell entries expressed in terms of area proportions (Olofsson et al. 2014; Stehman and
Foody 2019). The derived accuracy indices included the area-weighted overall accuracy (OA),
user’s accuracy (UA), producer’s accuracy (PA), where the expressions for calculation can be
found in the supplementary material (Tables S4 and S5). In addition, accuracy evaluation was con-
ducted for the water samples (both permanent and seasonal water samples presented in Table S2) to
characterize errors of commission judged by seasonal class.
The validation strategies were different for evaluating the mapping results and training samples.
In terms of evaluating the water mapping results, the independent manually labeled sample sets
were used (Section 2.2.3), where proportional allocation was employed. For the evaluation of the
samples at each study site, we used a stratified sampling strategy to randomly select a total number
of 250 sample points from the total training samples within the permanent water, seasonal water,
and non-water strata for each year of 1999, 2004, 2009, 2014, and 2009. Strata were created for the
three classes derived from annual water occurrence (the combination map integrating GSWD-
YWH and GLAD-AWP used here, as similar as in Section 3.2). The annually selected samples
were composed of 100 non-water points, 100 permanent water points, and 50 seasonal points
(either non-water or water types), and the five-year data were made up of all the sample sets for
the validation. Although proportional allocation can result in smaller standard errors for estimating
the OA values (Olofsson et al. 2014; Stehman and Foody 2019), the precision of water samples was
vital for deriving a reliable classifier for water mapping. Therefore, we increased the proportion of
water pixels in the sample sets for validation. To explore the temporal characteristics of the samples,
the points to be validated were selected across the monthly image archives throughout the year. The
selected sample sets were manually interpreted by visual examination, considering the pixels’ spatial
and spectral characteristics. The images covered with more than 50% invalid pixels were discarded
to ensure the selected samples can be interpreted.
In addition to the quantitative evaluation, the water mapping results are also compared with the
results obtained by the commonly used water indices, as well as with the GSWD and GLAD data-
sets, via visual analysis.

4. Results
4.1. Accuracy evaluation of the automatically constructed training samples
To validate the accuracy of the training samples, 250 randomly selected training samples collected
in 1999, 2004, 2009, 2014, and 2019 within Regions A–E are visually examined. The spatial distri-
bution of the sampling points for validation and the associated errors for the five study regions in
2019 is shown in Figure 4. The confusion matrix is given in Table 1, where the OA is used to quan-
tify the evaluation results.
 INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF DIGITAL EARTH 219

The validation results show that the OA for the training sample sets is 98.7%, over all the study
sites. Region B and Region E achieve the equally high precision (OA: 99.0%). For Region B, the high
precision is likely because surface water is relatively sparse in the northern part of China. In terms of
Region E, the water bodies in this region are mainly large lakes with clear boundaries. Compara-
tively, the accuracy of the sample sets in Region A (OA: 98.7%), Region C (OA: 98.6%) and Region
D (OA: 98.4%) is relatively lower. This is mainly because the water types in these urban regions are
complicated and contain large numbers of urban targets that are difficult to recognize. Similar
trends can be found in analyzing the precision of water and non-water samples, which can be
derived with the cell entries in Table 1. Moreover, as shown in Figure 4, the yellow and red dots
indicate the spatial distribution of water samples with omission and commission errors in 2019,
respectively. The results show that errors mainly occur in the minor water bodies, and along the
border of rivers and lakes. However, the number of those incorrectly classified samples is small,
which demonstrate that the automatically constructed training sample sets are of high quality
and can be considered as reliable for the subsequent surface water mapping. Considering the vari-
ations of the spectral properties of water, the automatically constructed training samples were com-
posed of both permanent water/non-water samples and seasonal samples. To interpret the
distribution of the training samples in the spectral feature space, please refer to Figure S1. Given
that the amount of incorrectly classified water samples is rather small, we did not calculate extra
accuracy indexes judged by seasonal class.

4.2. Accuracy assessment of the water mapping results

4.2.1. Accuracy of the surface water maps
In this section, we evaluate the surface water mapping results using the manually labeled samples as
the reference. Each annual sample set for 2000, 2005, 2010, 2015, and 2020 contained 1000 water
and non-water pixels, where the number of samples for each category can be found in Table S2.
As an example, the spatial distribution of the sample points and the associated errors within
Regions A–E in 2020 is presented in Figure 5. The area-weighted UA, PA, and OA values calculated

Figure 4. The spatial distribution of the sample points for validation and errors within Regions A–E (2019).
 220
L. YUE ET AL.
Table 1. The error matrix of the training sample set in the study areas.
1999 2004 2009 2014 2019 Total
Region NW* W* OA NW* W* OA NW* W* OA NW* W* OA NW* W* OA OA
A NW 122 3 98.4% 135 0 99.1% 122 1 98.8% 132 3 98.5% 124 2 98.8% 98.7%
W 1 124 2 133 2 125 1 114 1 123
B NW 117 0 98.9% 100 0 99.3% 116 1 99.2% 123 2 98.8% 122 2 98.8% 99.0%
W 3 130 2 148 1 132 1 124 1 125
C NW 125 1 98.8% 137 2 99.3% 127 1 98.4% 135 2 98.4% 118 4 98.0% 98.6%
W 2 122 0 111 3 119 2 111 1 127
D NW 115 3 98.3% 132 1 98.8% 128 2 98.8% 136 5 98.2% 129 5 98.1% 98.4%
W 1 131 2 115 1 119 0 109 0 116
E NW 124 2 98.8% 128 0 99.2% 133 3 98.9% 118 2 99.2% 120 2 98.8% 99.0%
W 1 123 2 120 0 114 0 130 1 127
Overall / / / 98.6% / / 99.1% / / 98.8% / / 98.6% / / 98.5% 98.7%
* NW: predicted non-water; W: predicted water; NW*: labeled non-water; W*: labeled water.
Cell entries are presented in terms of the number of samples, and the derived accuracy indices are calculated in terms of proportion of area in Tables S4 and S5.
 INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF DIGITAL EARTH 221

Figure 5. Spatial distribution of the manually labeled sample points and errors within Regions A–E (2020).

using the samples and water mapping results for the corresponding images are shown in Table 2.
Furthermore, the accuracy results for permanent and seasonal water are given in Table 3.
The average OA of the surface water maps for the five study areas is 98.5%, which indicates that
the mapping results have been validated to be of high accuracy using the 25,000 random samples
distributed across spatial and temporal scales. Specifically, the non-water category generally has a
higher UA and PA than the water class. Moreover, the accuracy of the water maps varies for the
different regions. Region E has the highest accuracy (OA: 99.5%), which is consistent with the accu-
racy evaluation results for the sample sets in Table 1. As for Regions C and D, the accuracies are
relatively lower. The complex drainage systems within those two humid urban regions might be
the main reason for this result. For Regions A and B, we noticed that the PA values are higher
than the UAs for the water class, which indicate that the commission errors are the major factors
influencing the overall accuracies. The distribution of erroneous points presented in Figure 5 also
agree well with the quantitative accuracy evaluation results. In terms of the accuracies judged by
seasonality class given in Table 3, the accuracy of permanent water mapping (average PA:
99.8%) is higher than that of seasonal water (average PA: 93.6%). Among the study regions, Region
E has the highest accuracy of extracting seasonal water pixels (PA: 97.3%), and Region D (PA:
89.7%) has the lowest accuracy.
Although the accuracy of the surface maps differs slightly between the study sites, the results
indicate that the proposed method shows a robust performance in surface water mapping with
the training sample sets automatically constructed at a regional scale.

4.2.2. Comparison with water indices

Three commonly used water indices (i.e. NDWI, mNDWI, AWEI) were selected for the compari-
son. For a fair comparison, the optimal thresholds for the three index-based algorithms were manu-
ally adjusted for each region. We did not use the commonly used Otsu’s thresholding method to
automatically determine the thresholds because it failed to obtain satisfactory results, possibly
due to the large-scale and complex land-cover distribution in our cases. The water mapping results
for the image scenes across the five study sites are presented in Figures 6 and 7.
 222
L. YUE ET AL.
Table 2. Area-weighted accuracy of water mapping classification results based on the validation sets in the study areas (NW: non-water; W: water).
2000 2005 2010 2015 2020 Total
Region UA PA OA UA PA OA UA PA OA UA PA OA UA PA OA OA
A NW 99.6% 99.0% 98.9% 100% 98.1% 98.5% 99.9% 98.4% 98.7% 99.6% 99.1% 99.0% 99.9% 98.4% 98.6% 98.7%
W 96.4% 98.6% 93.2% 100% 94.4% 99.5% 96.9% 98.6% 93.4% 99.5%
B NW 99.9% 99.2% 99.2% 99.8% 98.9% 98.8% 99.6% 98.8% 98.5% 99.2% 99.0% 98.4% 99.7% 99.4% 99.1% 98.8%
W 92.5% 98.9% 89.9% 97.8% 88.9% 95.7% 91.2% 92.9% 94.2% 97.0%
C NW 97.8% 99.4% 97.9% 97.8% 99.9% 98.2% 99.2% 98.7% 98.4% 99.3% 98.2% 98.2% 99.3% 98.7% 98.5% 98.2%
W 98.3% 93.6% 99.6% 93.7% 96.1% 97.5% 94.6% 97.9% 96.1% 97.9%
D NW 98.8% 99.7% 98.9% 99.1% 98.8% 98.4% 99.0% 99.3% 98.8% 98.1% 99.6% 98.3% 98.0% 99.6% 98.2% 98.5%
W 99.2% 96.8% 96.7% 97.4% 98.1% 97.4% 98.8% 95.1% 98.8% 94.8%
E NW 99.8% 99.5% 99.4% 99.9% 99.6% 99.6% 99.8% 99.3% 99.2% 99.9% 99.6% 99.6% 99.8% 99.6% 99.5% 99.5%
W 97.5% 98.7% 98.1% 99.4% 96.3% 98.7% 98.1% 99.4% 98.1% 98.7%
Overall NW 99.2% 99.3% 98.8% 99.3% 99.0% 98.7% 99.5% 98.9% 98.7% 99.2% 99.1% 98.7% 99.3% 99.1% 98.8% 98.5%
W 97.4% 96.8% 96.1% 97.3% 95.5% 97.9% 96.4% 97.0% 96.4% 97.4%
The derived accuracy indices are calculated in terms of proportion of area in Table S2.
 INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF DIGITAL EARTH 223

Table 3. Accuracy for seasonal and permanent water samples among the validation sets in the study areas.
Region Water types Misclassified as non-water Correctly classified as water Product’s accuracy
Region A Seasonal water 4 104 96.3%
Permanent water 0 981 100%
Overall water 4 1085 99.6%
Region B Seasonal water 7 241 97.2%
Permanent water 0 240 100%
Overall water 7 481 98.6%
Region C Seasonal water 21 206 90.7%
Permanent water 1 975 99.9%
Overall water 22 1181 98.2%
Region D Seasonal water 17 148 89.7%
Permanent water 2 1113 99.8%
Overall water 19 1261 98.5%
Region E Seasonal water 1 36 97.3%
Permanent water 5 754 99.4%
Overall water 6 790 99.2%
Total Seasonal water 50 735 93.6%
Permanent water 8 4063 99.8%
Overall water 58 4798 98.8%
The seasonality of pixels was determined based on the GSWD-YWH data.

Among the four methods, the NDWI algorithm obtains the worst results, where a substantial
number of non-water pixels are misclassified as water, and the complete shape of the water bodies
is frequently omitted. The commission errors mainly come from the man-made targets in the
urban areas with confusable spectral features in the visible bands, which can be clearly observed
in Figures 6 and 7(c). Comparatively, the other three methods obtain similar mapping results. All
the methods are influenced by the shadow and dark targets, to different extents. However, the
mNDWI and AWEI indices tend to produce more noisy outputs, as shown in the highlighted
regions in Figure 7(b) and (c). Furthermore, both the mNDWI and AWEI can hardly distinguish
accurate boundaries among the small ponds and paddy fields, which are commonly found in the
southern part of China (as shown in Figure 7(d)). With the distinctive spectral reflectance of clear
water and few building shadows, the results for Region E (Figures 6 and 7(e)) show the best accu-
racy, with only marginal differences between the classification methods. Overall, the proposed
method obtains promising water mapping results in all the cases, and can extract the seasonal
water pixels along the borders of water bodies well. Through the tests conducted for the five
study sites with varied land-cover patterns, terrain conditions, and image qualities, the proposed
water mapping method showed a robust performance in large-scale water mapping. Furthermore,
the fully automatic processing pipeline is superior to the other index-based methods as no extra
manual labor is required.

4.2.3. Comparison with the existing global water datasets

In this section, we compare the annual water occurrence derived by the proposed method with the
existing GSWD and GLAD products. Figure 8 presents the permanent and seasonal water mapping
results for 2020 for the different water datasets. For the results obtained by the proposed method
and the GLAD dataset, the permanent and seasonal water was classified according to the annual
water percentage in 2020, based on the thresholds defined in Section 3.5. For the GSWD product,
the mapping results were derived from the published YWH dataset. Overall, the results confirm that
the results of the proposed method are generally consistent with the GSWD product. Compara-
tively, the GLAD product tends to contain more noisy results due to the large amounts of misclas-
sified pixels (Figure 8(d) and (e)). Moreover, the water maps and statistics for the GLAD product
show quite different distributions, compared with the other two datasets, especially for Regions D
and E.
224 L. YUE ET AL.

Figure 6. Comparative performance in water mapping. The first column is the raw image, and the successive columns indicate
the results obtained by the proposed method and the NDWI, mNDWI, and AWEI indices, respectively. The rows from top to bot-
tom represent the results for Regions A–E. T is the manually adjusted threshold for the water indices. The clouds are masked as
white pixels. Zoomed-in views of the corresponding highlighted regions marked by the rectangular boxes are presented in
Figure 7.

In Figures 9 and 10, the zoomed-in visual inspection for the highlighted subregions in Figure 8
provides more detailed information, where the annual water mapping results for 2000–2020 at a
five-year interval are provided for comparison. In Figure 9, the GSWD product fails to extract the
complete boundary of the small-size lake, with the central regions within the lake polygon cate-
gorized as seasonal water. This is likely caused by the terms used for distinguishing annual sea-
sonal water by the GSWD product, in that a pixel would be excluded from the permanent water
category if it was classified as a non-water type in any one of the valid monthly water maps. In this
way, the water mapping results can be sensitive to the accuracy of the monthly composite imagery
and the derived classification results. Figure 10 shows another featured case, where the water
mapping results for Lake Ulan Ula in Qinghai, China, are presented. This is a natural salt lake
 INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF DIGITAL EARTH 225

Figure 7. Zoomed-in views of the corresponding highlighted rectangular regions in Figure 6. The regions with distinctive per-
formance in the figures are highlighted with the rectangular boxes.

with marshlands distributed along the lakeshore, where the lake surface can be frozen for as long
as six months within a year. In this case, there are enormous differences in the water area statistics
between the GLAD product and the other two datasets (Figure 8(e)). Similar to the processing
flow of the GSWD product, the GLAD product regards the ice and snow-covered water area as
invalid pixels and excludes them from the calculation of the water occurrence. However, a
large area of ice-covered water is wrongly classified as non-water pixels in the monthly water
map for 2020 (Figure S2). As a result, the water occurrence is underestimated, and this large
area of permanent water is wrongly classified as seasonal water. The GSWD product’s monthly
water maps are also presented in Figure S3. There is obvious inconsistency between the two
open-access datasets, which is probably caused by the different detection algorithms for water
and invalid pixels. Compared with the GLAD and GSWD products, the proposed method calcu-
lates the water occurrence based on the images throughout a year. Moreover, some of the
226 L. YUE ET AL.

Figure 8. The permanent and seasonal water mapping results derived from the water occurrence for 2020 for the different water
datasets in the five study sites. From top to bottom, each row indicates the results for the proposed method, GSWD, and GLAD,
respectively. Moreover, columns (a)–(e) show the corresponding results for Regions A–E.

Figure 9. Annual water mapping results for the highlighted region in Figure 8(a). The second row indicates the results obtained
by the proposed method without temporal correction.

contaminated information can be repaired through the temporal correction of invalid pixels, pro-
ducing more robust water mapping results. The temporal correction causes various degrees of
change in different areas, as shown in Figures 9 and 10. More details about the effectiveness of
the temporal correction are provided in Section 5.2.
 INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF DIGITAL EARTH 227

Figure 10. Annual water mapping results for the highlighted region in Figure 8(e). The second row indicates the results obtained
by the proposed method without temporal correction.

5. Discussions
5.1. Commission and omission error sources
The experiments presented in Section 4 showed that the proposed method achieved generally good
results in the five study sites with varied hydrological conditions. However, some potential limit-
ations should be considered. It was found that shadow pixels are one of the commission error
sources for water detection in urban areas and rugged terrain regions. With the similar low reflected
spectral signals for the visible and infrared bands, shadow pixels are easily misclassified as water
(Figure 7(b) and (c)). For the areas with rugged terrain, the incorporation of DEM data can exclude
most of the topographic shadows from the extracted water areas. However, the accurate identifi-
cation of building shadows is still challenging. Visual inspection of Figure 7(c) shows that the pro-
posed method suppresses the urban shadowed areas effectively, and results in smaller commission
errors than the water indices. This can be attributed to the proposed method benefiting from the
diverse spectral features contained in the randomly selected sample sets covering various land
types in the training process.
Moreover, the pixels distributed near the edge of water bodies are often characterized by mixed
spectral features from both water and land, making them difficult to be accurately recognized
(Huang et al. 2018; Li and Xu 2021). By incorporating seasonal water samples in the training set,
which typically reflect the diverse spectral properties of shallow water pixels, the proposed method
performs better in extracting the complete boundaries of water bodies. However, the spatial resol-
ution of Landsat images is only 30 m, and thus some narrow channels and edge pixels with a small
fraction of water among the mixed pixels can still be missed. This is reflected in the results where
some drainage and lake polygons are discontinuous (e.g. Figure 7(b) and (d)). In this study, we did
not pay much attention to sub-pixel accuracy assessment for the edge pixels. This was since it is
difficult to define whether a mixed pixel should be classified as water or non-water without prior
knowledge of the accurate sub-pixel water percentage. This information can be acquired with
the aid of high-resolution images, but the precise registration between 30-m Landsat images and
228 L. YUE ET AL.

Figure 11. Water mapping results before and after temporal correction. The first column is the raw imagery, and the second
column is the preliminary classification results of the random forest classifier. The third column is the mapping results after tem-
poral correction for invalid pixels, while the last column is the reference image without cloud cover.

meter-level images is challenging. Therefore, we focused on the pixel-level accuracy assessment for
the water mapping task.

5.2. Effectiveness of the temporal correction

As shown in Figure 11, the temporal correction process effectively reconstructs the missing infor-
mation and generates seamless water maps. However, the results also indicate that the improvement
differs between regions. Thus, how can we confirm the efficacy of the temporal correction process?
Furthermore, as the long-term water occurrence (1984–2020) was used as the reference for the cor-
rection (Section 3.4), how would the result be affected with a different reference employed?
In Table 4, we present the statistics for the number of images in the sampling years for each study
site. The results show that the ratio of corrected images (RCI) is only 2.03% for Region
B. Comparatively, the RCI for Region E is as high as 83.50%. This means that, among the 394 images
used to calculate the water occurrence for Region E in these five years, only 16.5% of them (65
scenes) were good-quality images (cloud cover less than 5%) that did not need correction. Com-
bined with the number of abandoned low-quality images, only 0.79% of the contaminated images
(NCI/(NCI + NUI)) were corrected for Region B, while the corresponding proportion was 34.9%
for Region E. The low proportion of corrected images for Region B is mainly due to the relatively
sparse distribution of surface water in this area. If there was not enough water area to derive a

Table 4. Statistics on the number of images for each study site.

2000 2005 2010 2015 2020
Region NGI NCI NUI NGI NCI NUI NGI NCI NUI NGI NCI NUI NGI NCI NUI RCI
A 31 30 152 29 29 113 43 21 110 35 44 113 26 3 136 52.92%
B 74 2 203 79 3 191 68 1 174 78 2 221 87 0 219 2.03%
C 18 4 66 17 10 66 18 3 66 25 15 95 24 2 83 25.00%
D 19 20 121 13 13 109 17 16 73 24 15 138 11 23 137 50.88%
E 5 11 133 6 44 119 6 90 90 17 136 123 31 48 196 83.50%
NGI denotes the number of good-quality images, and NCI represents the number of corrected images. RCI is the ratio of corrected
images, where RCI = NCI/(NCI + NGI). NUI represents the number of unused images which were abandoned due to low
quality.
 INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF DIGITAL EARTH 229

Figure 12. Water mapping results for Region E after temporal correction referenced by water occurrence data with different
temporal scales. (a) The raw image for interpretation. (b) The reference image. (c)–(f) The corrected results corresponding to
four occurrence datasets with different temporal windows, i.e. 1984–2020, 2001–2020, 2011–2020, and 2016–2020. A
zoomed-in view of the highlighted region is shown in Figure S4.

statistically significant occurrence histogram, the correction process would be terminated as the
occurrence threshold would be out of the range of 5–75% (see Section 3.4). For Region E, this
area is characterized by low precipitation, and thus the cloud coverage is also relatively low.

Figure 13. Water mapping results for Region D after temporal correction referenced by water occurrence data with different
temporal scales. (a) The raw image for interpretation. (b) The reference image. (c)–(f) The corrected results corresponding to
four occurrence datasets with different temporal windows, i.e. 1984–2020, 2001–2020, 2011–2020, and 2016–2020. A
zoomed-in view of the highlighted region is shown in Figure S5.
230 L. YUE ET AL.

However, as the high-latitude lakes are frozen for much of the year, there are still a large number of
contaminated images to be corrected. The waterbodies in Region E are mainly composed of large-
and medium-size lakes. Therefore, the temporal correction method shows an excellent performance
in repairing the contaminated scenes in this region. For Regions C and D with more humid climate
conditions, the ratio of images with extreme cloud pollution is high, which were hardly effectively
corrected. Overall, the temporal correction is effective in cases where sufficient water information is
available to infer the regional water distribution. The temporal correction shows a robust perform-
ance for the partly contaminated images, and significantly improves the number of effective images
for the temporal analysis.
Taking Figures 12 and 13 as examples, we evaluated the effectiveness of the temporal correction
by analyzing the scene-based correction results, and tested the impact of the temporal scale of the
water occurrence data used as a reference. The GSWD-SWO data corresponding to four different
temporal windows were tested, i.e. 1984–2020, 2001–2020, 2011–2020, and 2016–2020. The results
indicate that, for some large lakes occupied by permanent water, the correction process is generally
satisfactory, regardless of the reference used. In this case, the long-term occurrence information can
help to prevent the results being contaminated by noise, as shown in Figure S4. However, surface
water is highly dynamic, especially in the context of global warming and accelerated urbanization.
For the water areas with abrupt changes in recent years, such as the expanded lakes and newly built
reservoirs, a derived water occurrence close to the acquisition time of the imagery can better reflect
the real distribution of the water. This can be observed in Figure 13 and Figure S5, where the paddy
fields and aquaculture area occurring after 2010 are easily missed based on the long-term water
occurrence. Based on these results, we suggest using five-year or ten-year composite water occur-
rence data for the temporal correction in the regions with recent changes. For some highly dynamic
regions, short-period water occurrence data close to the image acquisition time should be used as
the reference.

6. Conclusions
In this paper, we have proposed a fully automatic surface water mapping framework on the GEE
platform. Firstly, we built a robust scheme to automatically construct training samples by integrat-
ing information from the GSWD and GLAD products. Secondly, the classified water maps with
invalid observations were repaired using a temporal correction method, obtaining more accurate
water occurrence statistics.
The proposed method was employed to produce surface water maps and water occurrence
maps and was evaluated in five representative regions in China. The accuracy assessment and
visual evaluation indicated that the proposed method could generate good-quality samples
(OA: 98.7%), and the accuracy of the mapping results was generally high across the different
regions. Comparative tests confirmed that the proposed method can produce better water
maps than the index-based water mapping algorithms (including NDWI, mNDWI, and
AWEI), as well as the GSWD and GLAD products. The errors mainly come from the shadow
areas and pixels distributed along the edge of water bodies with mixed spectral characteristics.
Furthermore, the temporal correction is an effective way to increase the valid observations for
the temporal analysis. However, attention should be paid to the regions with recent changes,
where short-period water occurrence data close to the image acquisition time should be used
as the reference. Moreover, seasonal pixels with low water occurrence values might be missed
in the reconstruction process. Overall, with the open-access code package, the fully automatic
processing pipeline on the GEE platform enables the proposed framework to be used to conduct
monitoring and analysis of surface water dynamics at different spatial and temporal scales. We
believe that the water datasets derived using the proposed framework can provide extra infor-
mation for further tasks.
 INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF DIGITAL EARTH 231

Acknowledgements
We would like to acknowledge Prof. Qiusheng Wu for developing geemap python package, and acknowledge Google
for providing free access to the Google Earth Engine platform. We also thank anonymous reviewers and the editors
for their constructive comments that helped improve the manuscript.

Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Funding
This work was supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China [grants numbers 42171375 and
41801263].

Data availability statement

The data and Python code package were available to interested users (https://github.com/GISer-Bao/Water-
Classification-GEE), where more water mapping results and auxiliary files can be examined.

ORCID
Huanfeng Shen http://orcid.org/0000-0002-4140-1869

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