A lake data set for the Tibetan Plateau from the 1960s, 2005, and 2014

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Abstract

Long-term datasets of number and size of lakes over the Tibetan Plateau (TP) are among the most critical components for better understanding the interactions among the cryosphere, hydrosphere, and atmosphere at regional and global scales. Due to the harsh environment and the scarcity of data over the TP, data accumulation and sharing become more valuable for scientists worldwide to make new discoveries in this region. This paper, for the first time, presents a comprehensive and freely available data set of lakes’ status (name, location, shape, area, perimeter, etc.) over the TP region dating back to the 1960s, including three time series, i.e., the 1960s, 2005, and 2014, derived from ground survey (the 1960s) or high-spatial-resolution satellite images from the China-Brazil Earth Resources Satellite (CBERS) (2005) and China’s newly launched GaoFen-1 (GF-1, which means high-resolution images in Chinese) satellite (2014). The data set could provide scientists with useful information for revealing environmental changes and mechanisms over the TP region.

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China: The third pole.

Jane Qiu (2008)

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Drastic change in China's lakes and reservoirs over the past decades

Xiankun Yang, Xixi Lu (2014)

Using remote sensing images, we provided the first complete picture of freshwater bodies in mainland China. We mapped 89,700 reservoirs, covering about 26,870 km2 and approximately 185,000 lakes with a surface area of about 82,232 km2. Despite relatively small surface area, the total estimated storage capacity of reservoirs (794 km3) is triple that of lakes (268 km3). Further analysis indicates that reservoir construction has made the river systems strongly regulated: only 6% of the assessed river basins are free-flowing; 20% of assessed river basins have enough cumulative reservoir capacity to store more than the entire annual river flow. Despite the existence of 2,721 lakes greater than 1 km2, we found that about 50 lakes greater than km2 have formed on the Tibetan Plateau resulting from climate change. More than 350 lakes of ≥1 km2 vanished in four other major lake regions. Although the disappearance of lakes happened in the context of global climate change, it principally reflects the severe anthropogenic impacts on natural lakes, such as, the excessive plundering of water resources on the Inner Mongolia-Xinjiang Plateau and serious destruction (land reclamation and urbanization) on the eastern plains.

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Tibetan plateau river incision inhibited by glacial stabilization of the Tsangpo gorge

Oliver Korup, David Montgomery (2008)

A considerable amount of research has focused on how and when the Tibetan plateau formed in the wake of tectonic convergence between India and Asia. Although far less enquiry has addressed the controls on river incision into the plateau itself, widely accepted theory predicts that steep fluvial knick points (river reaches with very steep gradients) in the eastern Himalayan syntaxis at the southeastern plateau margin should erode rapidly, driving a wave of incision back into the plateau. Preservation of the plateau edge thus presents something of a conundrum that may be resolved by invoking either differential rock uplift matching erosional decay, or other mechanisms for retarding bedrock river incision in this region where high stream power excludes the potential for aridity as a simple limit to dissection of the plateau. Here we report morphologic evidence showing that Quaternary depression of the regional equilibrium line altitude, where long-term glacier mass gain equals mass loss, was sufficient to repeatedly form moraine dams on major rivers: such damming substantially impeded river incision into the southeastern edge of the Tibetan plateau through the coupled effects of upstream impoundment and interglacial aggradation. Such glacial stabilization of the resulting highly focused river incision centred on the Tsangpo gorge could further contribute to initiating and accentuating a locus of rapid exhumation, known as tectonic anaeurysm.

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Journal

Journal ID (nlm-ta): Sci Data

Journal ID (iso-abbrev): Sci Data

Title: Scientific Data

Publisher: Nature Publishing Group

ISSN (Electronic): 2052-4463

Publication date (Electronic): 21 June 2016

Publication date Collection: 2016

Volume: 3

Electronic Location Identifier: 160039

Affiliations

[1 ]State Key Laboratory of Hydroscience and Engineering, Tsinghua University , Beijing 100084, China

[2 ]Department of Hydraulic Engineering, Tsinghua University , Beijing 100084, China

[3 ]School of Geosciences, China University of Petroleum , Qingdao 266580, China

[4 ]Department of Geographical Information Science, Nanjing University , Nanjing 210023, China

[5 ]State Key Laboratory of Lake Science and Environment, Nanjing Institute of Geography and Limnology, Chinese Academy of Sciences , Nanjing 210008, China

[6 ]Institute of Remote Sensing and Digital Earth, Chinese Academy of Sciences , Beijing 100101, China

[7 ]The Center for National Spaceborne Demonstration , Beijing 100101, China

Author notes

[a ] Y.H. (email: hongyang@ 123456tsinghua.edu.cn )

[b ] X.G. (email: xfgu@ 123456radi.ac.cn ).

[]

W.W., Y.H., D.L., and X.G. designed the study. W.W. wrote the paper. D.L. Y.M., Y.H., P.X., H.D., and X.G. reviewed the paper and contributed to the data analysis. Y.Y., Z.H, and Y.M. helped examine and improving the data set. Y.Y. and Z.H. collected part of the first version of the 2014 sub-dataset. P.X. and H.D. contributed to the collection of the 1960s and 2005 sub-datasets. X.G. helped to provide the 2014 GF-1 data.

Article

Publisher Item ID: sdata201639

DOI: 10.1038/sdata.2016.39

PMC ID: 4915272

PubMed ID: 27328160

SO-VID: 72e286fd-5b14-46a4-8d99-23b17b6e4095

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This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article’s Creative Commons license, unless indicated otherwise in the credit line; if the material is not included under the Creative Commons license, users will need to obtain permission from the license holder to reproduce the material. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0 Metadata associated with this Data Descriptor is available at http://www.nature.com/sdata/ and is released under the CC0 waiver to maximize reuse.

A lake data set for the Tibetan Plateau from the 1960s, 2005, and 2014

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Climate Change: Open Access

Most cited references 4

China: The third pole.

Drastic change in China's lakes and reservoirs over the past decades

Tibetan plateau river incision inhibited by glacial stabilization of the Tsangpo gorge

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