Assessment of Water Storage Change in China’s Lakes and Reservoirs over the Last Three Decades

Abstract

Lakes and reservoirs are essential elements of the hydrological and biochemical cycles, considered sentinels of global climate change. However, comprehensive quantifications of their water storage changes (∆V) at a large spatiotemporal scale are still rare. Here, we integrated a global surface water dataset and SRTM digital elevation models, both available from Google Earth Engine platform at a spatial resolution of 30 m, to evaluate ∆V for a total of 760 lakes and reservoirs across China at an annual timescale since 1984. The results indicated that (1) the aggregated water storage went through a slight increase of 41.5 Gt (1.7 Gt/yr) during 1985–2005, a significant decrease of 100 Gt (-20.6 Gt/yr) during 2005–2009, and then increased by 136.3 Gt (21.3 Gt/yr) during 2009–2015. (2) The increasing trend was largely attributed to lakes and reservoirs in the Tibetan Plateau Lake Zone, and the decreasing trend was mainly due to the North and Northwest Lake Zone, with little variations observed for the Northeast and Southwest Lake Zones. (3) Qinghai lake was associated with the largest increase (18.3 Gt) and Poyang lake presented the largest decline (-9.2 Gt). The results can help advance our understanding of the impact of climate change and improve future projection.