Quantifying the evaporation amounts of 75 high-elevation large dimictic lakes on the Tibetan Plateau

Binbin Wang; Yaoming Ma; Zhongbo Su; Yan Wang; Weiqiang Ma

doi:10.1126/sciadv.aay8558

Quantifying the evaporation amounts of 75 high-elevation large dimictic lakes on the Tibetan Plateau

Sci Adv. 2020 Jun 26;6(26):eaay8558. doi: 10.1126/sciadv.aay8558. eCollection 2020 Jun.

Authors

Binbin Wang¹, Yaoming Ma^{1

2

3

4}, Zhongbo Su^{5

6}, Yan Wang⁷, Weiqiang Ma^{1

2}

Affiliations

¹ Key Laboratory of Tibetan Environment Changes and Land Surface Processes, Institute of Tibetan Plateau Research, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing 100101, China.
² CAS Center for Excellence in Tibetan Plateau Earth Sciences, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing 100101, China.
³ University of Chinese Academy of Sciences, 100049, Beijing, China.
⁴ College of Atmospheric Sciences, Lanzhou University, Lanzhou 730000, China.
⁵ Faculty of Geo-Information Science and Earth Observation, University of Twente, Enschede 7500AE, Netherlands.
⁶ School of Environmental Science and Engineering, Chang'an University, Xian, China.
⁷ Department of Earth System Science, Tsinghua University, Beijing 100084, China.

Abstract

Lake evaporation can influence basin-wide hydrological cycles and is an important factor in loss of water resources in endorheic lakes of the Tibetan Plateau. Because of the scarcity of data, published lake evaporation values are inconsistent, and their spatial distribution has never been reported. Presenting a plausible hypothesis of energy balance during the ice-free seasons, we explored the multiyear (2003-2016) average ice phenology and evaporation amounts of 75 large dimictic lakes by using a combination of meteorological and satellite data. Evaporation amounts show large variability in spatial distribution, with a pattern of higher values in the south. Lakes with higher elevation, smaller area, and higher latitude are generally associated with a shorter ice-free season and lower evaporation. The total evaporated water amounts have values of approximately 29.4 ± 1.2 km³ year^-1 for the 75 studied lakes and 51.7 ± 2.1 km³ year^-1 for all plateau lakes included.

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