A high temporal resolution lake data set from multisource altimetric missions and Landsat archives of water level and storage changes on the Tibetan Plateau during 2000‒2017

The Tibetan Plateau (TP), known as the Earth Third Pole and Asia's water towers providing freshwater for a billion people in Asia, is quite sensitive to climate change, which can be reflected by changes in some hydrological state variables such as lake water storage. Due to the harsh environment and complex terrain, in situ measurements of lake water storage changes are extremely limited, whereas great efforts have been made to combine multisource remote sensing data to reveal variations in lake water level, water extent, and storage. The lack of consistency in water level observations due to the intervals between different satellite altimetry missions and the inaccuracy in trend estimation due to the low sampling frequency remain unsolved. This developed data set provides water level, hypsometric curves, and lake storage changes for 52 large lakes across the TP from 2000 to 2017, comprising traditional altimetry water levels and a unique source of information termed as the optical water levels derived from tremendous amounts of Landsat archives using Google Earth Engine. Optical water levels facilitate removal of the systematical bias between altimetry-derived water levels from different sources, as well as largely increase the sampling frequency and consequently improve the temporal resolution to monthly or even finer in some relatively small lakes. This data set and associated approaches are valuable for performing monthly, seasonal, interannual, and trend analyses of lake level and storage and short-term monitoring of lake overflow and flooding disasters on the Tibetan Plateau.