Lake area and volume variation in the endorheic basin of the Tibetan Plateau from 1989 to 2019.

The Tibetan Plateau, known as "the third pole of the Earth", is a region susceptible to climate change. With little human disturbance, lake storage changes serve as a unique indicator of climate change, but comprehensive lake storage data are rare in the region, especially for the lakes with an area less than 10 km² which are the most sensitive to environmental changes. In this paper, we completed a census of annual lake volume change for 976 lakes larger than 1 km² in the endorheic basin of the Tibetan Plateau (EBTP) during 1989-2019 using Landsat imagery and digital terrain models. Validation and comparison with several existing studies indicate that our data are more reliable. Lake volume in the EBTP exhibited a net increase of 193.45 km³ during the time period with an increasing rate of 6.45 km³ year^-1. In general, the larger the lake area, the greater the lake volume change, though there are some exceptions. Lakes with an area less than 10 km² have more severe volume change whether decreasing or increasing. This research complements existing lake studies by providing a comprehensive and long-term lake volume change data for the region. The dataset is available on Zenodo (https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.5543615, Wang et al., 2021). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]