The Tibetan Plateau, featuring the most extensive lake distribution in China, has seen rapid expansion of most its lakes. These lakes are important nodes for regional water and energy cycles, and highly sensitive to climate change. It is therefore imperative to unravel lake water storage changes under climate variation and change to improve the understanding of mechanisms of the interactions between regional hydrology and climate and their changes. This developed data set provides water level, hypsometric curves, and lake storage changes for 52 large lakes across the TP from 2000 to 2017, comprising traditional altimetry water levels and a unique source of information termed as the optical water levels derived from tremendous amounts of Landsat archives using Google Earth Engine. Field experiments agree with the theoritical analysis that the uncertainty of optical water level is 0.1 - 0.2 m, comparable with that of altimetry water level. The uncertainty of altimetry water level is represented by the standard deviation of water levels obtained from effective footprints of the same cycle, which is included in the dataset. This dataset is applicable in water resource and security management, lake basin hydrological analysis, water balance analysis and the like. For instance, it has great potential in monitoring lake overflow flood.

File naming and required software

This data set contains 52 time series of lake water level and lake storage change (52 text files), and one text file that stores hypsometric curves of all lakes. The format of the time series file name is "XXXX_Lake_water_ level_storage_changes", where XXXX represents the English name of the lake. It can be opened in Notepad. Besides the header file information, each time series file contains five columns of data, including data acquisition date, water level, water level uncertainty, lake storage change and data source. The header file contains the latitude and longitude of the lake and a detailed description of each column of data.

Data Citations Data citation guideline What's data citation?

Cite as:

Li, X., Long, D., Huang, Q., Han, P., Zhao, F., Wada, Y. (2019). High-temporal-resolution water level and storage change data sets for lakes on the Tibetan Plateau during 2000-2017. A Big Earth Data Platform for Three Poles, DOI: 10.1594/PANGAEA.898411. (Download the reference： RIS | Bibtex )

Related Literatures:

1. Li, X., Long, D., Huang, Q., Han, P., Zhao, F., and Wada, Y. (2019). High-temporal-resolution water level and storage change data sets for lakes on the Tibetan Plateau during 2000–2017 using multiple altimetric missions and Landsat-derived lake shoreline positions. Earth Syst. Sci. Data, 11, 1603–1627, https://doi.org/10.5194/essd-11-1603-2019.( 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

National Natural Science Foundation of China (91547210) (No:91547210)

National Key Research and Development Program of China (grant no. 2017YFC0405801)

National Natural Science Foundation of China (51722903) (No:51722903)

Copyright & License

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