A comprehensive data set of lake surface water temperature over the Tibetan Plateau derived from MODIS LST products 2001–2015

Abstract

Lake surface water temperature (LSWT) is sensitive to long-term changes in thermal structure of lakes and regional air temperature. In the context of global climate change, recent studies showed a significant warming trend of LSWT based on investigating 291 lakes (71% are large lakes, ≥50 km2 each) globally. However, further efforts are needed to examine variation in LSWT at finer regional spatial and temporal scales. The Tibetan Plateau (TP), known as ‘the Roof of the World’ and ‘Asia’s water towers’, exerts large influences on and is sensitive to regional and even global climates. Aiming to examine detailed changing patterns and potential driven mechanisms for temperature variations of lakes across the TP region, this paper presents the first comprehensive data set of 15-year (2001–2015) nighttime and daytime LSWT for 374 lakes (≥10 km2 each), using MODIS (Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer) Land Surface Temperature (LST) products as well as four lake boundary shapefiles (i.e., 2002, 2005, 2009, and 2014) derived from Landsat/CBERS/GaoFen-1 satellite images. The data set itself reveals significant information on LSWT and its changes over the TP and is an indispensable variable for numerous applications related to climate change, water budget analysis (particularly lake evaporation), water storage changes, glacier melting and permafrost degradation, etc.

An epilimnion and hypolimnion temperature model based on air temperature and lake characteristics

“…Thanks to their advantages, satellite images have increasingly been used to study the ecology of lakes in recent years (Dörnhöfer and Oppelt, 2016). Satellite data has been used to study the surface temperatures in extended geographical regions, such as France (Prats et al, 2018a), the Tibetan Plateau (Wan et al, 2017), the Arctic Coastal Plane (Huang et al, 2017), the US (Schaeffer et al, 2018) or even at world scale (Schneider and Hook, 2010;Layden et al, 2015). In other cases, satellite images have been used to study internal thermal patterns in lakes (Marti-Cardona et al, 2008;Allan et al, 2016;Woolway and Merchant, 2018), longitudinal surface thermal gradients in reservoirs (Martí-Cardona et al, 2016;Ling et al, 2017) or how lakes respond to meteorological forcing Merchant, 2017,2018).…”

Effect of Environmental Conditions and Morphometric Parameters on Surface Water Temperature in Polish Lakes

“…The issue of water temperature fluctuations in lakes is frequently discussed, among other reasons, due to the key importance of the parameter in the course of all processes and phenomena occurring in those ecosystems. Numerous studies concern the physical-chemical [6,7], biological [8,9], and hydrological aspects [10,11]. Considering the elementary importance of temperature for the functioning of lakes, issues related to the consequences of global warming are of high importance.…”

Reconstructing Six Decades of Surface Temperatures at a Shallow Lake

“…The temperature map for the whole lake from MODIS temperature products was extracted by a lake shapefile mask from high-resolution data of Landsat Thematic Mappez (TM) image at 30 m with a 3-pixels buffer zone along the shore to avoid errors due to fluctuations of land-water interfaces or the variance of year-to-year lake boundary [23]. The temperature was valid only if the ratio of acceptable quality pixels to water pixels was larger than 50% in the whole mask.…”