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The Global Surface Water dataset was developed by the European Commission's Joint Research Centre in the framework of the Copernicus Programme. It maps the location and temporal distribution of water surfaces at the global scale over the past 3.8 decades and provides statistics on their extent and change. It is provisioned as a global tiled raster resource available for all land areas. The reported data represent aggregated observations between 1984 - 2021.

Usage

get_global_surface_water_change(version = "v1_4_2021")

Arguments

version

A character vector indicating the version of the GSW data set to make available.

Value

A function that returns an sf footprint object.

Details

The change in water occurrence intensity between the two periods is derived from homologous pairs of months (i.e. same months containing valid observations in both periods). The difference in the occurrence of surface water was calculated for each homologous pair of months. The average of all of these differences constitutes the Surface Water Occurrence change intensity. The raster files have integer cell values between [0, 200] where 0 represents surface water loss and 200 represents surface water gain.

References

Pekel, JF., Cottam, A., Gorelick, N. et al. High-resolution mapping of global surface water and its long-term changes. Nature 540, 418–422 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1038/nature20584