Abstract
ABSTRACT The High Mountain Asia (HMA) region, ranging from the Hindu Kush and Tien Shan in the west to the Himalaya in the south with an altitude between 2000 and 8844 m, holds the largest reservoir of glaciers and snow outside Earth Polar Regions. In the last decades, numerous glaciers and lake areas there have undergone tremendous changes with water redistribution. In order to increase understanding of the pattern of distribution of water resources, and their dynamic changes at the basin scale, a watershed classification based on the water replenishment patterns dataset was constructed. The input dataset are from the Randolph Glacier Inventory V.6.0 and the vector data of rivers and streams. Four datasets were thus obtained: Glacier-fed and Runoff-fed Drainage Area (GRDA), Glacier-fed and Runoff-free Drainage Area (GDA), Glacier-free and Runoff-fed Drainage Area (RDA), and the Glacier-free and Runoff-free Drainage Area (NGRDA), and the numbers of these four types of basins are 87, 107, 32, and 448 separately. The statistical results show GRDA has the largest surface area, accounting for 82.2% of the total basin area in HMA, mainly in the region of the basin with outflow rivers or streams. Dominated by small basins, the GDA area accounts for the smallest area, only 3.86% and the RDA accounts for 5.62%. For NGRDA, most are with small areas, accounting for 8.32%, and mainly distributes in the closed basin of the Qiangtang Plateau. This dataset provides a fundamental classified data source for research on water resources, climate, ecology, and environment in HMA. The published data are available at https://data.4tu.nl/download/uuid:d07d748f-d10b-4308-9626-199ef05cc9af/ and http://www.dx.doi.org/10.11922/sciencedb.923.
Highlights
High Mountain Asia (HMA) is an Asia high-altitude mountain region centered with Qinghai-Tibet Plateau, which holds the largest reservoir of glaciers and snow outside Earth polar regions, ranging from the Hindu Kush and Tien Shan in the northwest to the J
We introduced and constructed a classified dataset by different water supply patterns, which was produced based on the hydrological data and maps based on SHuttle Elevation Derivatives at multiple Scales, the HydroSHEDS (Lehner, Verdin, & Jarvis, 2006), the last updated Randolph Glacier Inventory V6.0 (RGI Consortium, 2017), and the detailed runoff vector dataset of rivers and streams for the whole HMA
The research explains clearly the work to construct the dataset for four types of drainage areas, Glacier-fed and Runoff-fed Drainage Area (GRDA), Glacier-fed and Runoff-free Drainage Area (GDA), Runoff-fed Drainage Area (RDA), and NGRDA
Summary
Eastern Himalaya in the southeast, with altitude between 2000 and 8844 m (Bolch et al, 2019; Guo et al, 2015; Loomis et al, 2019; Qiu et al, 2019; Shean et al, 2019) It is an important area of alpine water resources at low and middle latitudes, contains different water storage types, for example, glaciers, river and streams, lakes, permafrost, and feed to several large rivers and endorheic basins which are known as “Asia’s water tower” (Barnett, Adam, Lettenmaier, 2005; Immerzeel, Van Beek, & Bierkens, 2010; Pritchard, 2017; Qiu, 2018; Yao et al, 2019; Zhu et al, 2019). Four vector dataset of drainage area (DA) were obtained, the Glacierfed and Runoff-Fed Drainage Area (GRDA), Glacier-fed and Runoff-free Drainage Area (GDA), Runoff-fed and Glacier-free Drainage Area(RDA), and Glacier-free and Runoff-free Drainage Area (NGRDA, here N represents none) These publicly opened datasets provide the necessary support for further research about the distribution, management, and research on the changes of water resources in HMA
Sign-in/Register to view highlights & summary Sign-in/Register to access full text options 
Talk to us
Join us for a 30 min session where you can share your feedback and ask us any queries you have
Schedule a call
