Shallow lakes in West Africa: height-area relationships derived from remote sensing (2018-2023)

Given the scarcity of in situ data, satellite remote sensing is an important tool for monitoring lake volume changes in this region. Several methods have been developed to do this using water height and area relationships, but few publications have compared their performance over small and medium-sized lakes.

In this work we compare four methods based on recent data from the Pleiades, Sentinel-2 and -3, ICESat-2 and GEDI missions over 16 lakes in the Central Sahel (Niger, Mali and Burkina Faso), ranging in area from 0.22 km² to 21 km². This dataset contains the remote sensing-derived height-area-volume relationships of the 16 lakes studied. It also includes the in-situ data-based height-area-volume relationships of the Arzuma reservoir and the Agoufou and Bangou Kirey lakes.