Maximum two-monthly surface water extent for MDB from MIM and WOFS

The multi-index method (MIM) (refer to Ticehurst, Teng and Sengupta 2022 in the Related Links for a description of the method) was developed for mapping surface water across the Murray-Darling Basin (MDB) based on Landsat surface reflectance data available in Digital Earth Australia. More than thirty years of two-monthly images of surface water extent across the whole MDB have been produced using this method, along with Water Observations from Space (WOfS) to fill in any gaps associated with cloud cover due to the different cloud masks used. The data were produced as part of the Murray-Darling Basin Ecosystem Function (MDB-EF) and Murray-Darling Water and Environment Research Program (MD-WERP) projects. Note that a new improved version has been developed and is expected to be released late 2022.\nLineage: Landsat data from 1988 to 2020 were extracted and processed using Digital Earth Australia as analysis-ready Landsat surface reflectance. Water Observations from Space (WOfS) water maps were also available through Digital Earth Australia. Processing was performed on the Australian National Computational Infrastructure using Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI), tested using jupyter notebooks, and batch-processed as python scripts. Images were processed as tiles, then mosaicked to form the two-monthly image of surface water for the MDB. (Refer to Ticehurst, Teng and Sengupta 2021 in the Related Links for further details).