Inter‐annual changes of alpine inland lake water storage on the Tibetan Plateau: Detection and analysis by integrating satellite altimetry and optical imagery

The effects of climate change have a substantial influence on the extremely vulnerable hydrologic environment of the Tibetan Plateau. The estimation of alpine inland lake water storage variations is essential to modeling the alpine hydrologic process and evaluating water resources. Due to a lack of historical hydrologic observations in this remote and inaccessible region, such estimations also fill a gap in studies on the continuous inter‐annual and seasonal changes in the inland lake water budget. Using Lake Siling Co as a case study, we derived a time‐series of lake surface extents from MODIS imagery, and scarce lake water level data from the satellite altimetry of two sensors (ICESat/GLAS and ENVISAT RA‐2) between 2001 and 2011. Then, based on the fact that the rise in lake water levels is tightly dependent on the expansion of the lake extent, we established an empirical model to simulate a continuous lake water level dataset corresponding to the lake area data during the lake's unfreezing period. Consequently, from three dimensions, the lake surface area, water level and water storage variations consistently revealed that Lake Siling Co exhibited a dramatic trend to expand, particularly from 2001 to 2006. Based on the statistical model and lake area measurements from Landsat images since 1972, the extrapolated lake water level and water storage indicate that the lake has maintained a continual expansion process and that the cumulative water storage variations during 1999–2011 account for 66.84% of the total lake water budget (26.87 km³) from 1972 to 2011. Copyright © 2013 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.