Estimating the volume and age of water stored in global lakes using a geo-statistical approach
By M. Messager, B. Lehner, G. Grill, I. Nedeva, Oliver Schmitt. Nature Communications, 2016
1,400 citations recorded by the source corpus.
Lakes are key components of biogeochemical and ecological processes, thus knowledge about their distribution, volume and residence time is crucial in understanding their properties and interactions within the Earth system. However, global information is scarce and inconsistent across spatial scales and regions. Here we develop a geo-statistical model to estimate the volume of global lakes with a surface area of at least 10 ha based on the surrounding terrain information. Our spatially resolved database shows 1.42 million individual polygons of natural lakes with a total surface area of 2.67 × 106 km2 (1.8% of global land area), a total shoreline length of 7.2 × 106 km (about four times longer than the world’s ocean coastline) and a total volume of 181.9 × 103 km3 (0.8% of total global non-frozen terrestrial water stocks). We also compute mean and median hydraulic residence times for all lakes to be 1,834 days and 456 days, respectively. Lakes play a key role in our ecosystems and thus it is vital to understand their distribution and volume. Here, the authors present a new global lake database (HydroLAKES) and develop a new geo-statistical model to show global lake area, shoreline length, water volume and hydraulic residence times.
Subfields: Oceanography, Water Science and Technology
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/54723138ca7789c04eb456d119b6a8cc0a301014
How researchers see this paper
The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.
In Oceanography
Citations in the corpus
- Lake storage variation on the endorheic Tibetan Plateau and its attribution to climate change since the new millennium (2018, methodology): “Our recent effort [3] applied multi-source satellite imagery (Landsat and Huanjing) to produce a detailed mapping of all lakes greater than 1 km2 (accounting for ∼97% of the total lake area [4]) across the CP from 2009–2014.”
- Transparency, Geomorphology and Mixing Regime Explain Variability in Trends in Lake Temperature and Stratification Across Northeastern North America (1975-2014) (2017, background): “Northeastern North America (NENA) has an exceptionally high density of lakes in comparison to the rest of the world [1].”
- The biomass distribution on Earth (2018, background): “Recent reports estimate the total area covered by lakes at ≈3×10(6) km(2) (296).”