Abstract
Abstract. Lakes provide many important benefits to society, including drinking water, flood attenuation, nutrition, and recreation. Anthropogenic environmental changes may affect these benefits by altering lake water levels. However, background climate oscillations such as the El Niño–Southern Oscillation and the North Atlantic Oscillation can obscure long-term trends in water levels, creating uncertainty over the strength and ubiquity of anthropogenic effects on lakes. Here we account for the effects of background climate variation and test for long-term (1992–2019) trends in water levels in 200 globally distributed large lakes using satellite altimetry data. The median percentage of water level variation associated with background climate variation was 58 %, with an additional 10 % explained by seasonal variation and 25 % by the long-term trend. The relative influence of specific axes of background climate variation on water levels varied substantially across and within regions. After removing the effects of background climate variation on water levels, long-term water level trend estimates were lower (median: +0.8 cm yr−1) than calculated from raw water level data (median: +1.2 cm yr−1). However, the trends became more statistically significant in 86 % of lakes after removing the effects of background climate variation (the median p value of trends changed from 0.16 to 0.02). Thus, robust tests for long-term trends in lake water levels which may or may not be anthropogenic will require prior isolation and removal of the effects of background climate variation. Our findings suggest that background climate variation often masks long-term trends in environmental variables but can be accounted for through more comprehensive statistical analyses.
Highlights
The water level of a lake is an integrative indicator of local and regional hydrology
We investigate two key areas of uncertainty: (1) whether apparent anthropogenic water level trends in specific lakes can be explained by background climate variation and (2) whether trends in water levels can be detected in specific lakes only after accounting for and removing the influence of background climate variation
The global scope of this analysis builds off similar analyses which aimed to disentangle background climate variation’s influence on lake water levels using smaller numbers of lakes from specific regions (Mercier et al, 2002; Molinos et al, 2015) or specific lakes (Cohn and Robinson, 1975; Stager et al, 2005; Tomasion and Valle, 2000)
Summary
The water level of a lake is an integrative indicator of local and regional hydrology. When multiple axes of background climate variation overlap, the effects can be even more intense – due to strong oceanic temperature anomalies in the late 1990s associated with both the ENSO and the IOD, water levels in eight East African Great Lakes went up by more than 1 m in less than a year (Mercier et al, 2002). This constituted a combined increase in water storage of more than 266 km3 – more than half the volume of Lake Erie
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