Skip to contents

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_transitions(version = "v1_4_2021")

Arguments

version

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

Value

A character of file paths.

Details

GSW transition data contains information about the type of surface water change for each pixel. The raster files have integer cell values between [0, 10] that code for different transition classes:

ValueTransition Class
1Permanent
2New Permanent
3Lost Permanent
4Seasonal
5New Seasonal
6Lost Seasonal
7Seasonal to Permanent
8Permanent to Seasonal
9Ephemeral Permanent
10Ephemeral Seasonal

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