ESTIMATING WATER LEVEL IN THE URMIA LAKE USING SATELLITE DATA: A MACHINE LEARNING APPROACH

Abstract. Lakes play a pivotal role in the development of cities and have major impacts on the ecosystem balancing of the area. Remote sensing techniques and advanced modeling methods make it possible to monitor natural phenomena, such as lakes’ water level. The ecosystem of Urmia Lake is one of the most momentous ecosystems in Iran, which is almost close-ended and has become a global environmental issue in recent years. One of the parameters affecting this lake water level is snowfall, which has a key role in the fluctuations of its water level and water resources management. Hence, the purpose of this paper is the Urmia Lake water level estimation during 2000–2006 using observed water level, snow cover, direct precipitation, and evaporation. For this purpose, Support Vector Regression (SVR), which is the most outstanding kernel method (with various kernel types), has been used. Furthermore, four scenarios are considered with different variables as inputs, and the output of all scenarios is the water level of the lake. The results of training and testing data indicate the substantial impact of snow on retrieving the water level of the Urmia Lake at the desired period, and due to the complexity of the data relationships, the Gaussian kernel generally had better results. On the other hand, Quadratic and Cubic kernels did not work well. The fourth scenario, with RBF kernel has the best results [Training: R² = 97% and RMSE = 0.09 m, Testing: R² = 96.97% and RMSE = 0.08 m].