Abstract
Abstract. The water resources of Tibetan plateau, particularly the lakes, has been influenced by global climate change and also reacted to global change. It is important to study the lake changes in the Tibetan plateau. This paper aimed to analyse the changes detected from remote sensing images for the typical lakes in Tibetan Plateau, including Qinghai Lake, Nam Co and Selin Co, using different information extraction methods, such as the single-band threshold method, NDWI, MNDWI, MSCT, MLC, SVM and object-oriented classification method. Results show that object-oriented classification method is better at removing ice, snow, cloud and mountain shadow, while the NDWI and MNDWI generated the worst results for lake extraction. After that, the lake's long temporal changes for Qinghai Lake, Nam Co and Selin Co derived from 12 images in different periods have been analysed using GIS technology. Results show that between 1985 and 2015, Qinghai Lake has expanded after a steady expansion; Nam Co was in the state about stable to expansion to stable. The area increased by 70.03 km2, a growth rate of 2.33 km2 a-1 and had a small change in area; Selin Co expanded after a stable state, and the area is always growing, and Selin Co's growth rate is larger than Qinghai Lake and Nam Co at the same time.
Highlights
Lakes and rivers are part of the land water circle, one of the indispensable places for human survival, and the effects of climate change, environment change, and ecosystem stability are important
This article is based on the ArcGIS software to extract the Nam Co, using the intersect tool to get access to the images of the lake in which it interacts with the result of visual interpretation
By using the visual interpretation (VI) result as a standard, it shown in table 1 that the amount of lake area extracted from the MSCT is 2029.28 km2
Summary
Lakes and rivers are part of the land water circle, one of the indispensable places for human survival, and the effects of climate change, environment change, and ecosystem stability are important. The Tibetan Plateau which known as the third pole of the world, densely populated by many lakes, and it is the source of many rivers such as Yangtze River and the Yellow River. The lakes are one of the key components of the Qinghai-Tibet Plateau's water resources, driving further development of the region and the global biochemistry process. 53.2% of China's lakes are located in the Tibetan Plateau, so it is called the 'water tower' of the world. For regional response to the Qinghai-Tibet plateau, global climate change affects the water resources of the Tibetan Plateau, the lakes, and vice verse. The study of lakes in the Tibetan Plateau is a very important task
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