Global statistics for surface area and volume of natural world lakes

The volume and mean depth of Earth's lakes

“…In Table 2, we provide abundance, total area, total volume (with confidence bounds), mean depth, and average volume of lakes in each area size class. Most of the volume of Earth's lakes is held in just a few large lakes, consistent with previous reports [e.g., Herdendorf, 1982;Ryanzhin, 2005]; the challenge of accurately estimating total volume resides in estimating the contribution of the millions of remaining lakes. The fraction of total volume declines with logarithmic area size class, though even small ---------À0.0059 0.395 Large lakes 77 ---------À0.0041 0.603 a RMSE and mean residual are relative to the overall scaling relationship.…”

“…Number and total area are computed directly from the lake area census used herein [ Verpoorter et al ., ]; total volume and confidence bounds are estimated from quantiles of the bootstrapping and Monte Carlo procedure described in the text. Data for lakes > 10 10 m 2 are taken from Ryanzhin [].…”

“…These improvements in the size partitioning, uncertainty quantification, and theoretical grounding of total lake volume alone represent a major step forward in understanding the distribution of lake water on the [Verpoorter et al, 2014]; total volume and confidence bounds are estimated from quantiles of the bootstrapping and Monte Carlo procedure described in the text. Data for lakes > 10 10 m 2 are taken from Ryanzhin [2005].…”

“…For our scaling analysis, we excluded the 20 largest lakes because their volumes are well defined, to maximally constrain volume estimates. We applied the scaling relationships to the remaining lakes and then subsequently added the volumes for the largest lakes back to the total estimated from the scaling analysis [ Ryanzhin , ]. We included lakes ≥ 0.01 km 2 in our analysis, 28 million of which are recorded in Verpoorter et al .…”

Estimating the volume and age of water stored in global lakes using a geo-statistical approach

“…Most statistical models that aim to predict lake volumes have used lake surface area as a proxy, often relying on a power relationship between the two parameters5758. However, in analogy to the concept of ‘topographic lake depth' as explained above, it can be generally postulated that deep lakes preferentially occur in mountainous regions while plains are indicative of shallower lakes.…”