EOWetMet: Annual Lake Ice Regime Classification Dataset for NWT and Sweden (2021-2025)

The EOWetMet Lake Ice Regime Classification provides annual peak-winter classifications of lake ice regime across two Arctic 500 km × 500 km study areas in the Northwest Territories, Canada, and northern Sweden for the period of 2021 to 2025. The datasets distinguish floating ice and bedfast ice regimes within lakes within each study area at the pixel level. The dataset forms part of the EOWetMet Community Database and was developed to provide high-resolution, annually dynamic lake ice regime product for these study areas, supporting bottom-up lake methane emission modelling, permafrost and thermokarst monitoring, freshwater ecology and overwinter habitat assessment, and northern infrastructure and winter water supply planning. Lake ice regime classifications were derived from Sentinel-1 C-band SAR imagery acquired near the timing of maximum ice thickness in late winter, prior to the onset of spring surface melt, following the adaptive threshold classification method of Engram et al., 2018. For each annual scene, backscatter values extracted from lake pixels, defined using the EOWetMet: Annual Wetland and Lake Classification Dataset for NWT and Sweden Water class as a lake mask, were modelled as a bimodal mixture of two Gaussian distributions representing bedfast and floating ice lakes. Each pixel in the classified product has an ID of 0 (Floating Ice) or 1 (Bedfast Ice). Products are delivered at 10 m spatial resolution as individual GeoTIFFs (zipped) and as a NetCDF with one classification layer per year from 2021 to 2025. An auxiliary lake ID polygon shapefile is provided to support users in identifying large or deep lakes where the classification is subject to uncertainty. The study areas are located as follows:NWT: Top Left - 69°45'49.62"N, 138°30'22.94"W Top Right – 70°25'37.28"N, 125°29'17.32"WBottom Right – 65°56'45.22"N, 125° 2'42.60"WBottom Left – 65°24'50.88"N, 135°50'38.95"WCentre - 67°45'59.43"N, 130°45'28.96"WSweden: Top Left – 68°10'47.21"N, 11°41'4.11"ETop Right – 68°54'38.40"N, 24°39'48.56"EBottom Right – 63°57'26.17"N, 25° 6'6.50"EBottom Left – 63°22'22.70"N, 14°19'44.28"ECentre - 66° 8'51.24"N, 19°45'36.16"E References--------------------------------------Engram, M., Arp, C.D., Jones, B.M., Ajadi, O.A., Meyer, F.J., 2018. Analyzing floating and bedfast lake ice regimes across Arctic Alaska using 25 years of space-borne SAR imagery. Remote Sensing of Environment 209, 660–676. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.rse.2018.02.022