50 Years of Water Body Monitoring: The Case of Qaraaoun Reservoir, Lebanon

Abstract. The sustainable management of the Qaraaoun Reservoir, the largest surface water body in Lebanon located in the Bekaa Plain, depends on reliable monitoring of its storage volume despite frequent sensor malfunctions and limited maintenance capacity. This study introduces a sensor-free approach that integrates open-source satellite imagery, advanced water-extent segmentation, and machine learning to estimate the reservoir’s surface area and, subsequently, its volume in near real time. Sentinel-2 and Landsat 1–9 images are processed, where surface water is delineated using a newly proposed water segmentation index. A machine learning model based on Support Vector Regression (SVR) is trained on a curated dataset that includes water surface area, water level, and water volume derived from a reservoir bathymetric survey. The model is then able to estimate the water body’s volume solely from the extracted water surface, without the need for any ground-based measurements. Water segmentation using the proposed index aligns with ground truth for over 95% of the shoreline. Hyperparameter tuning with GridSearchCV yields an optimized SVR performance, with an error below 1.5% of the full reservoir capacity and coefficients of determination exceeding 0.98. These results demonstrate the method’s robustness and cost-effectiveness, offering a practical solution for continuous, sensor-independent monitoring of reservoir storage. The proposed methodology is applicable to other water bodies and generates over five decades of time-series data, offering valuable insights into climate change and environmental dynamics, with an emphasis on capturing temporal trends rather than exact water volume measurements.