Lakes collect runoff, sediment and nutrients from upstream watersheds and are an important "destination" of material migration at the watershed scale. Therefore, the attributes of lake water and sediment are affected by catchment attributes (e.g. climate, terrain and vegetation conditions) to a large degree. This dataset delineates the watershed boundaries of 1525 Lakes (with an area from 0.2 to 4503 square kilometers) on the Tibetan Plateau, and calculates 721 catchment-scale attributes on the aspects of lake body, terrain, climate, vegetation, soil/geology and anthropogenic activities. This is the first dataset of lake-catchment characteristics on the Tibetan Plateau, which can provide foundamental data for the study of lakes in the Tibetan Plateau.

File naming and required software

The LCC-TP v1.0 dataset is stored in shapefile and csv format, and the contents of each file are as following:

1. The spatial_data directory
1) lakes.shp: the spatial distribution of lakes;
2) full_catchments.shp: the spatial extent of full catchments of lakes;
3) inter-lake_catchments.shp: the spatial extent of inter-lake catchments. In this dataset, the inter-lake catchments are obtained by excluding the contributing areas of upstream lakes larger than 0.2 km2 from the full catchments considering that large lakes block the transport of materials from upstream to downstream.
4) flowpath.shp: the flow paths among upstream and downstream lakes.

2. LCC-TP_attributes.csv: The attributes of lakes and their lake catchments, which are linked with the spatial data through the "LakeID" field. Please refer to the document "Description of attributes in LCC-TP v1.0.docx" for the meaning of each field.

3. The time_series directory
The time series of daily meteorological data from 1979 to 2018 are stored in the csv files in this directory. Each column in the csv file, except for the first one, corresponds to the data of a lake, and the column name is lake ID. The name of each file consists of two parts, connected by an underscore. The first part specifies the spatial extent which can be lake body (LK), full catchments (FC) and inter-lake catchments (IC). The second part specifies the type of meteorological variable which can be temp (temperature, K), prec (precipitation, mm), wind (wind speed, m/s), pres (air pressure, Pa), LRAD (long wave radiation, W/m2), SRAD (short wave radiation, W/m2) and Shum (specific humidity, kg/kg).

Data Citations Data citation guideline What's data citation?

Cite as:

Liu, J. (2022). A dataset of lake-catchment characteristics for the Tibetan Plateau (v1.0) (1979-2018). A Big Earth Data Platform for Three Poles, DOI: 10.11888/Terre.tpdc.272026. CSTR: 18406.11.Terre.tpdc.272026. (Download the reference： RIS | Bibtex )

Related Literatures:

1. Liu, J.Z., Fang, P.C., Que, Y.F., Zhu, L.J., Duan, Z., Tang, G.A., Liu, P.F., Ji, M.K., & Liu, Y.Q. (2022). A dataset of lake-catchment characteristics for the Tibetan Plateau. Earth Syst. Sci. Data, 14, 3791–3805.( View Details | Bibtex)

Using this data, the data citation is required to be referenced and the related literatures are suggested to be cited.

Support Program

Second Tibetan Plateau Scientific Expedition Program

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License： This work is licensed under an Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0)