Monitoring based on remote sensing provides more information as compared to the in situ monitoring from a macroscopical viewpoint. This paper proposes an optimized method for monitoring the lake from the orbit. First, we identify the lake shorelines and obtain the area of the surface brine from OLI Landsat8 satellite data. Then, we compare the lake areas obtained for the year 2014 and three seasons of the year 2015. A subtle decrease is observed from the year 2014 to 2015, in contrast with the general increase trend for Zabuye in the past decades due to the climate change, indicating the influence of the exploitation, which shows that the lithium production should be rational. Besides, the brine depth, the salinity, the lithium and boron concentrations for Zabuye Salt lake are retrieved quantitatively using the GF-1 multispectral data, and the results are in good consistency with those measured in situ, showing the reliability of our methods.

Zabuye Salt Lake  /  dynamic change  /  monitoring by remote sensing  /  Li/B concentration  /  quantitative retrieval