Remote Sensing of Multitemporal Functional Lake‐To‐Channel Connectivity and Implications for Water Movement Through the Mackenzie River Delta, Canada

Abstract

The Mackenzie River Delta in Canada is a mediator of hydrological transport between the expansive Mackenzie River watershed and the Beaufort Sea. Within the delta, lakes frequently act as water and sediment traps, limiting or delaying the movement of material to the coastal ocean. The degree to which this filtering takes place depends on the ease with which sediment‐laden water is transported from distributary channels into deltaic lakes, referred to as functional lake‐to‐channel connectivity, which varies both spatially and temporally. Tracking of connectivity has previously been limited to either small regions of the delta or has focused on a snapshot of connectivity at a single instance in time. Here we describe an algorithm that uses Landsat imagery to track summertime functional lake‐to‐channel connectivity of 10,362 lakes between 1984 and 2022 on an image‐by‐image basis. We calculate a total average connected lake area of 1400.7 km2 during the 2 weeks after peak discharge, 763.6 km2 higher than previous estimates, suggesting a larger influence of connected lakes on water movement through the delta than previously estimated. We also identify water level thresholds that lead to the initiation of high sediment river water movement into 5,989 lakes (908 lakes with uncertainty ≤±0.5 m), and identify an additional 2899 lakes whose connectivity does not vary at all. As the Arctic hydrological cycle responds to climate change, this work lays a foundation for tracking the movement of water, and the matter it carries, from the Mackenzie River watershed to the Beaufort Sea.