A global lake and reservoir volume analysis using a surface waterdataset and satellite altimetry

Abstract

Abstract. Lakes and reservoirs are crucial elements of the hydrological and biochemical cycle and are a valuable resource for hydropower, domestic and industrial water use and irrigation. Although their monitoring is crucial in times of increased pressure on water resources by both climate change and human interventions, publically available datasets of lakes and reservoir levels and volumes are scarce. Within this study, a time series of variation in lake and reservoir volume between 1984 and 2015 were analysed for 135 lakes over all continents by combining the JRC Global Surface Water (GSW) dataset and the satellite altimetry database DAHITI. The GSW dataset is a highly accurate surface water dataset at 30 m resolution compromising the whole L1T Landsat 5, 7 and 8 archive, which allowed for detailed lake area calculations globally over a very long time period using Google Earth Engine. Therefore, the estimates in water volume fluctuations using the GSW dataset are expected to improve compared to current techniques as they are not constrained by complex and computationally intensive classification procedures. Lake areas and water levels were combined in a regression to derive the hypsometry relationship (dh/dA) for all lakes. Nearly all lakes showed a linear regression, and 42 % of the lakes showed a strong linear relationship with an R2 > 0.8 and an average R2 of 0.91. For these lakes and for lakes with a nearly constant lake area (coefficient of variation