Indian Institute of Technology Bombay (IIT Bombay) on Wednesday said it has developed an open-source web-based application, IMPART, that allows researchers to track changing water surface temperatures helping them to track climate change.

IMPART calculates the temperature of lake water surfaces considering the dynamic changes in its areas. Factors such as growing urbanisation, seasonal variations and rising temperatures alter lake surface areas and volumes from time-to-time, necessitating a more nuanced approach, IIT Bombay said in a statement.

"Accounting for dynamic changes in lake water surface extent significantly improves the accuracy of lake water surface temperature estimations," said Prof J Indu from the Department of Civil Engineering and Interdisciplinary Centre for Climate Studies at IIT Bombay and lead researcher of the study.

The IMPART toolkit calculated both static and dynamic lake water surface temperatures for 342 lakes worldwide, including 115 lakes in India.

For its static module, the software used the same water extent indicated in the databases from where monthly surface temperatures were obtained.

In the dynamic module, the IMPART toolkit estimated how the water area changed for each monthly measurement of surface temperature in the database.

"Dynamic considerations have now become feasible thanks to the advancements in remote sensing, cloud-based platforms (such as Google Earth Engine), and algorithms capable of incorporating reflectance data with dynamic lake extents, thus enabling a more accurate and comprehensive analysis," explained Prof Kumar Nitish and Prof J Indu from the premier institute's Department of Civil Engineering and Interdisciplinary Centre for Climate Studies.

IMPART allows climate scientists to monitor lake water surface temperatures more accurately and study and mitigate the impact of these changes on the ecosystems within and around. It has a strong potential as a tool for tracking climate change, and the tool's applications can be extended to other research areas, they said.

"IMPART can be applied to water resource management, ecological health assessments of lakes, and early-warning systems for lake ecosystems under environmental stress," Prof Indu added.

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