Lake Mead surface-water loss

A multi-temporal Landsat classification and change-detection analysis, 1981 to 2022

GEOG 883, Remote Sensing, The Pennsylvania State University. Final project, MGIS program, 2023.

Remote Sensing
Landsat
Supervised Classification
Change Detection
Accuracy Assessment
ArcGIS Pro

The question

My final project for GEOG 883 (Remote Sensing) in the Penn State Master of GIS program. It quantifies how much of Lake Mead's surface water has disappeared over four decades, and when, using seven Landsat scenes from 1981 to 2022.

What I did

Each scene was classified into water and land with a supervised K-nearest-neighbor classifier in ArcGIS Pro, checked with a stratified accuracy assessment, converted to polygons, and measured.

What it found

The classified surface area fell 47.5% across the study period, and the key finding is the timing: the reservoir was stable through 1999 and has been in continuous decline since.

Originally submitted for GEOG 883; revised for portfolio presentation with the analysis and figures unchanged.