Earth Syst. Sci. Data, 11, 1603–1627, 2019 https://doi.org/10.5194/essd-11-1603-2019 © Author(s) 2019. This work is distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License. High-temporal-resolution water level and storage change data sets for lakes on the Tibetan Plateau during 2000–2017 using multiple altimetric missions and Landsat-derived lake shoreline positions Xingdong Li1, Di Long1, Qi Huang1, Pengfei Han1, Fanyu Zhao1, and Yoshihide Wada2 1State Key Laboratory of Hydroscience and Engineering, Department of Hydraulic Engineering, Tsinghua University, Beijing, China 2International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis (IIASA), 2361 Laxenburg, Austria Correspondence: Di Long (
[email protected]) Received: 21 February 2019 – Discussion started: 15 March 2019 Revised: 4 September 2019 – Accepted: 22 September 2019 – Published: 28 October 2019 Abstract. The Tibetan Plateau (TP), known as Asia’s water tower, is quite sensitive to climate change, which is reflected by changes in hydrologic state variables such as lake water storage. Given the extremely limited ground observations on the TP due to the harsh environment and complex terrain, we exploited multiple altimetric mis- sions and Landsat satellite data to create high-temporal-resolution lake water level and storage change time series at weekly to monthly timescales for 52 large lakes (50 lakes larger than 150 km2 and 2 lakes larger than 100 km2) on the TP during 2000–2017. The data sets are available online at https://doi.org/10.1594/PANGAEA.898411 (Li et al., 2019). With Landsat archives and altimetry data, we developed water levels from lake shoreline posi- tions (i.e., Landsat-derived water levels) that cover the study period and serve as an ideal reference for merging multisource lake water levels with systematic biases being removed.