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The Yellow River, the mother river of China, is one of the world's longest rivers and irrigates over 10 percent of Chinese cropland (Cai & Rosegrant, 2004). Like most major Asian rivers, the Yellow River gains its first drop of freshwater from the mountains in the Tibetan Plateau or widely known as the Asian Water Towers (Immerzeel et al., 2010). The source area of the Yellow River (SAYR) is located at the northeast margin of the Tibetan Plateau. Although the SAYR occupies only about one sixth of the basin, it contributes to over one third of the river discharge (Gou et al., 2010), and thus is a disproportionately important water reservoir for the downstream. Unlike the headwaters of most major Asian rivers, the SAYR is the least dependent on glacial melt due to the lack of mountain glaciers (Immerzeel et al., 2010). Instead, it is increasingly influenced by the permafrost degradation (Cheng & Wu, 2007;Sun et al., 2020). This feature makes it particularly important to investigate the hydroclimate of the SAYR because most areas in the Tibetan Platen will experience what the SAYR is currently experiencing, with shrinking mountain glacier (Pritchard, 2019;Yao et al., 2012) and thawing permafrost (Cheng & Wu, 2007) in a warming world. Glacier shrinking and permafrost degradation will likely reduce the albedo of the Tibetan

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