Study on the relationship between the variation of lakes in Qinghai-Tibetan Plateau and global climate change

Abstract

The Qinghai-Tibet Plateau is the largest lake area in China, with a total area of existing lakes of 36,900 km2, accounting for 52% of the total lake area of China. Lakes on the Tibetan Plateau play critical roles in the water cycle and ecological and environment systems of the Plateau. The obvious changes of lake area in Qinghai-Tibet Plateau can be directly expressed by the remote sensing images. Three periods of Landsat images, one period of topographic map and the meteorological materials in recent 50 years were collected to extract the changes. After analyzing the change trend of lake area, annualmean temperature and annualmean precipitation, it was found that the change of lake area has a close correlation to the change of annual mean temperature but not to the change of annual mean precipitation.