Abstract

Lake surface water temperature (LSWT) is a critical physical property of the aquatic ecosystem and an evident indicator of climate change. By combining the strengths of satellite-based observation and modelling, we have produced an integrated daily lake surface water temperature for 160 lakes across the Tibetan Plateau where in-situ observation is limited. The satellite-based lake-wide mean LSWT in the integrated dataset includes that for the daytime, night-time and for the daily mean for the period 2000–2017. The dataset is comparable with other satellite-based LSWT products (e.g., LSWT from AVHRR and ARC-Lake) and unique for its tempo-spatial span and resolution. Calibrated and validated against the satellite-based LSWT, complete and consistent daily LSWT dataset have been reconstructed and extended to the period 1978–2017 basing on the modified air2water model. According to the reconstructed LSWT dataset, it is found that annual LSWT of lakes in the Tibetan Plateau has increased significantly in the period 1978–2017 with increase rate ranging at 0.01 to 0.4 °C 10 a−1. The warming trends of the lakes are more evident in winter than in summer. The integrated dataset together with the methods introduced herein can contribute to the research community to explore water and heat balance changes and the consequent ecological effects at the Tibetan Plateau in the future researches. Data from this study are openly available via the Zenodo portal, with DOI https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.5111400 (Guo et al., 2021).

Highlights

  • Lake surface water temperature (LSWT) is a critical physical property of the aquatic ecosystem and an evident indicator of climate change (Austin and Colman, 2008; Livingstone, 2003; Williamson et al, 2009)

  • The lake surface water temperature derived from the MOD11A1 is compared against two satellite-based datasets released by other researches, which were based on AVHRR (Liu et al, 2019) and ARC-Lake (Layden et al, 2015) respectively

  • It should be noted that the AVHRR-based LSWT from the TPlake_Temp is 155 that of the daytime instead of the daily mean, it is compared against our MODIS-based daytime LSWT

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Summary

Introduction

Lake surface water temperature (LSWT) is a critical physical property of the aquatic ecosystem and an evident indicator of climate change (Austin and Colman, 2008; Livingstone, 2003; Williamson et al, 2009). One of the datasets bases on MODIS and provides 8-day mean surface temperature of 374 lakes for the period 2001-2015 (Wan et al, 2017), while the other bases on AVHRR and presents daytime lake surface water temperature of 97 lakes with area above 80km for the 50 period 1981-2015 (Liu et al, 2019). Both the two datasets for lakes in the Tibetan Plateau, have quite a few missing data caused by revisit period of satellite and inconsistency in the time series due to calibration among the successive satellites.

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