Inundation Frequency

Inundation frequency (IF) data was obtained from the Global Surface Water Explorer Portal (Pekel et al., 2016). The water occurence tiles of 60W and 70W were merged and cropped to along the middle-lower Amazon River. Inundation frequency varies from 0% to 100%, where 0% indicates areas that remain dry throughout the year, 100% indicates areas that remain wet, while the values in between reflect seasonally flooded areas. For detailed code on how the raster was processed using rasterio and rioxarray, please refer to this repository.

Code

import numpy as np
import matplotlib.pyplot as plt
import rasterio as rio

# Import IF cropped
IF_crop = rio.open("../data/IF_crop.tif")

# Read into a NumPy array (only 1 band)
IF_crop_np = IF_crop.read(1)

# Plot
fig, ax = plt.subplots(figsize=(10, 4))
img = ax.imshow(IF_crop_np)

# Set background to beige
fig.patch.set_facecolor("#F9F8F2")
ax.set_facecolor("#F9F8F2")

# Create an inset axes for the colorbar in the bottom right
cax = ax.inset_axes([0.8, 0.15, 0.15, 0.03])  # [x, y, width, height]

# Colorbar
cbar = fig.colorbar(img, cax=cax, orientation='horizontal', shrink=0.3)
cbar.ax.set_title("IF (%)", fontsize=10, pad=4, color='white') # title
cbar.outline.set_linewidth(0)                                  # remove black outline
cbar.ax.tick_params(size=0)                                    # remove ticks
cbar.ax.xaxis.set_tick_params(pad=4, colors='white')           # tick labels

# Remove axes for clean aesthetics
ax.axis("off")

The floodplain lakes of the middle-lower Amazon exhibit an interesting morphology. Each floodplain contains multiple lakes that form a patch network, interconnected with one other and the Amazon River by floodplain channels. This unique morphology causes the water levels in the floodplains to be largely in sync with the water level changes in the Amazon River, leading to significant variation in flooding frequency across the middle-lower Amazon.