Abstract
The Tibetan Plateau (TP) plays an essential role in the water supply to Asia’s large river systems and, as the largest and highest mountain plateau in the world, it drives the Asian monsoon and influences global atmospheric circulation patterns. The increase in TP lake volume since the mid-1990s is well documented, however the drivers of lake growth remain largely unexplained. In this study we investigate changes in lake and glacier volumes, together with changes in precipitation and evapotranspiration at basin scale. We calculate the contribution of glacier mass loss to the lake volume increase for the period 1994-2015. We demonstrate that glacier mass loss does have a limited contribution to the lake volume increase (19 ± 21 % for the whole TP). Glacier mass loss is thus insufficient to explain all of the lake volume gain, and despite large spread in various products that estimate precipitation and evaporation, we suggest that an increase in precipitation excess (precipitation - evapotranspiration) may be sufficient to explain the lake volume gain.
Highlights
Lakes are widespread features of the Tibetan plateau, with more than 1,000 lakes larger than 1 km2 (Zhang et al, 2017a)
While glacier mass loss is relatively steady from 1990 to 2016 (Figure 2A), the lake mass increases from 1995 on-wards
By combining recent observations of lake and glacier mass change for the endorheic Tibetan plateau, we demonstrate that glacier mass loss has a relatively limited contribution of 19 ± 21% to the recent lake mass increase
Summary
Lakes are widespread features of the Tibetan plateau, with more than 1,000 lakes larger than 1 km (Zhang et al, 2017a). The lake delineation is not always consistent among the different studies, and neither are the study periods, all of them conclude that the lakes have gained mass at a pace of 6–9 Gt/yr from the mid-1990s to the mid-2010s. This increase in lake storage is confirmed by an increase in the total land water storage, as observed in Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment (GRACE) data (Wang et al, 2016; Xiang et al, 2016; Zhang et al, 2017b; Yao et al, 2018; Loomis et al, 2019). During the same time period, the Tibetan glaciers have been losing mass (Gardner et al, 2013; Shean et al, 2020)
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