Abstract
Lake ecosystems are jeopardized by the impacts of climate change on ice seasonality and water temperatures. Yet historical simulations have not been used to formally attribute changes in lake ice and temperature to anthropogenic drivers. In addition, future projections of these properties are limited to individual lakes or global simulations from single lake models. Here we uncover the human imprint on lakes worldwide using hindcasts and projections from five lake models. Reanalysed trends in lake temperature and ice cover in recent decades are extremely unlikely to be explained by pre-industrial climate variability alone. Ice-cover trends in reanalysis are consistent with lake model simulations under historical conditions, providing attribution of lake changes to anthropogenic climate change. Moreover, lake temperature, ice thickness and duration scale robustly with global mean air temperature across future climate scenarios (+0.9 °C °Cair–1, –0.033 m °Cair–1 and –9.7 d °Cair–1, respectively). These impacts would profoundly alter the functioning of lake ecosystems and the services they provide.
Similar content being viewed by others
Data availability
The ISIMIP2b lake sector simulations presented in this study are available through the Earth System Grid Federation (ESGF, https://esgf-data.dkrz.de/). The ERA5-Land lake data used in this study are developed by the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts (ECMWF) and are available through the Copernicus Climate Change Service’s Climate Data Store (CDS, https://cds.climate.copernicus.eu/cdsapp#!/search?type=dataset). The Global Lake Temperature Collaboration Dataset lake surface temperatures used for evaluating ERA5-Land can be found here: https://portal.edirepository.org/nis/mapbrowse?packageid=knb-lter-ntl.10001.3. ESA CCI lake products can be found here: https://catalogue.ceda.ac.uk/uuid/3c324bb4ee394d0d876fe2e1db217378. The Global Lake and River Ice Phenology Database is available at https://nsidc.org/data/lake_river_ice/.
Code availability
All code used to generate these analyses are available through the GitHub repository of the Department of Hydrology and Hydraulic Engineering at VUB (https://github.com/VUB-HYDR/2021_Grant_etal).
Change history
11 November 2021
A Correction to this paper has been published: https://doi.org/10.1038/s41561-021-00866-2
References
Mueller, H., Hamilton, D. P. & Doole, G. J. Evaluating services and damage costs of degradation of a major lake ecosystem. Ecosyst. Serv. 22, 370–380 (2016).
Rinke, K., Keller, P. S., Kong, X., Borchardt, D. & Weitere, M. Ecosystem Services from Inland Waters and Their Aquatic Ecosystems (Springer, 2019).
Bonan, G. B. Sensitivity of a GCM simulation to inclusion of inland water surfaces. J. Clim. 8, 2691–2704 (1995).
Subin, Z. M., Murphy, L. N., Li, F., Bonfils, C. & Riley, W. J. Boreal lakes moderate seasonal and diurnal temperature variation and perturb atmospheric circulation: analyses in the Community Earth System Model 1 (CESM1). Tellus A 64, 15639 (2012).
Thiery, W. et al. Understanding the performance of the FLake model over two African Great Lakes. Geosci. Model Dev. 7, 317–337 (2014).
Thiery, W. et al. The impact of the African Great Lakes on the regional climate. J. Clim. 28, 4061–4085 (2015).
Scott, R. W. & Huff, F. A. Impacts of the Great Lakes on regional climate conditions. J. Great Lakes Res. 22, 845–863 (1996).
Griffiths, K., Michelutti, N., Sugar, M., Douglas, M. S. & Smol, J. P. Ice-cover is the principal driver of ecological change in High Arctic lakes and ponds. PLoS ONE 12, e0172989 (2017).
Tan, Z., Yao, H. & Zhuang, Q. A small temperate lake in the 21st century: dynamics of water temperature, ice phenology, dissolved oxygen, and chlorophyll a. Water Resour. Res. 54, 4681–4699 (2018).
Austin, J. A. & Colman, S. M. Lake Superior summer water temperatures are increasing more rapidly than regional temperatures: a positive ice-albedo feedback. Geophys. Res. Lett. 34, L06604 (2007).
Ghanbari, R. N., Bravo, H. R., Magnuson, J. J., Hyzer, W. G. & Benson, B. J. Coherence between lake ice cover, local climate and teleconnections (Lake Mendota, Wisconsin). J. Hydrol. 374, 282–293 (2009).
Duguay, C. R. et al. Recent trends in Canadian lake ice cover. Hydrol. Process. 20, 781–801 (2006).
Sharma, S. et al. Widespread loss of lake ice around the Northern Hemisphere in a warming world. Nat. Clim. Change 9, 227–231 (2019).
O’Reilly, C. M. et al. Rapid and highly variable warming of lake surface waters around the globe. Geophys. Res. Lett. 42, 10773–10781 (2015).
Woolway, R. I. & Merchant, C. J. Worldwide alteration of lake mixing regimes in response to climate change. Nat. Geosci. 12, 271–276 (2019).
O’Reilly, C. M., Alin, S. R., Piisnier, P. D., Cohen, A. S. & McKee, B. A. Climate change decreases aquatic ecosystem productivity of Lake Tanganyika, Africa. Nature 424, 766–768 (2003).
Hansen, G. J., Read, J. S., Hansen, J. F. & Winslow, L. A. Projected shifts in fish species dominance in Wisconsin lakes under climate change. Glob. Change Biol. 23, 1463–1476 (2017).
Lyons, J. et al. Trends in the reproductive phenology of two Great Lakes fishes. Trans. Am. Fish. Soc. 144, 1263–1274 (2015).
Muñoz-Sabater, J. ERA5-Land Hourly Data from 1981 to Present (Copernicus, 2019).
Ribes, A., Azaís, J. M. & Planton, S. Adaptation of the optimal fingerprint method for climate change detection using a well-conditioned covariance matrix estimate. Clim. Dyn. 33, 707–722 (2009).
Allen, M. R. & Stott, P. A. Estimating signal amplitudes in optimal fingerprinting, part I: theory. Clim. Dyn. 21, 477–491 (2003).
Bindoff, N. L. et al. in Climate Change 2013: The Physical Science Basis (eds Stocker, T. F. et al.) 867–952 (Cambridge Univ. Press, 2013).
Gillett, N. P. et al. The Detection and Attribution Model Intercomparison Project (DAMIP v1.0) contribution to CMIP6. Geosci. Model Dev. 9, 3685–3697 (2016).
Frieler, K. et al. Assessing the impacts of 1.5 °C global warming—simulation protocol of the Inter-Sectoral Impact Model Intercomparison Project (ISIMIP2b). Geosci. Model Dev. 10, 4321–4345 (2017).
Wan, H., Zhang, X., Zwiers, F. & Min, S. K. Attributing northern high-latitude precipitation change over the period 1966–2005 to human influence. Clim. Dyn. 45, 1713–1726 (2015).
Qian, C. & Zhang, X. Human influences on changes in the temperature seasonality in mid- to high-latitude land areas. J. Clim. 28, 5908–5921 (2015).
Gudmundsson, L., Seneviratne, S. I. & Zhang, X. Anthropogenic climate change detected in European renewable freshwater resources. Nat. Clim. Change 7, 813–816 (2017).
Padrón, R. S. et al. Observed changes in dry-season water availability attributed to human-induced climate change. Nat. Geosci. 13, 477–481 (2020).
Ribes, A., Planton, S. & Terray, L. Application of regularised optimal fingerprinting to attribution. Part I: method, properties and idealised analysis. Clim. Dyn. 41, 2817–2836 (2013).
Myhre, G. et al. in Climate Change 2013: The Physical Science Basis (eds Stocker, T. F. et al.) 659–740 (Cambridge Univ. Press, 2013).
Maberly, S. C. et al. Global lake thermal regions shift under climate change. Nat. Commun. 11, 1232 (2020).
Ito, A. et al. Pronounced and unavoidable impacts of low-end global warming on northern high-latitude land ecosystems. Environ. Res. Lett. 15, 044006 (2020).
Dibike, Y., Prowse, T., Saloranta, T. & Ahmed, R. Response of Northern Hemisphere lake-ice cover and lake-water thermal structure patterns to a changing climate. Hydrol. Process. 25, 2942–2953 (2011).
Bonsal, B. R., Prowse, T. D., Duguay, C. R. & Lacroix, M. P. Impacts of large-scale teleconnections on freshwater-ice break/freeze-up dates over Canada. J. Hydrol. 330, 340–353 (2006).
Korhonen, J. Long-term changes in lake ice cover in Finland. Nord. Hydrol. 37, 347–363 (2006).
Bonsal, B. R. & Prowse, T. D. Trends and variability in spring and autumn 0 °C-isotherm dates over Canada. Climatic Change 57, 341–358 (2003).
Giardino, C., Merchant, C. & Simis, S. Preparing for the first Lakes ECV climate data record. Lakes Newsletter (October 2019).
Mastrandrea, M. D. et al. Guidance Note for Lead Authors of the IPCC Fifth Assessment Report on Consistent Treatment of Uncertainties Technical Report (IPCC, 2010).
Frieler, K. et al. Assessing the impacts of 1.5 °C global warming—simulation protocol of the Inter-Sectoral Impact Model Intercomparison Project (ISIMIP2b). Geosci. Model Dev. 10, 4321–4345 (2017).
Lange, S. EartH2Observe, WFDEI and ERA-Interim Data Merged and Bias-corrected for ISIMIP (EWEMBI) (GFZ Data Services, 2016).
Lawrence, D. M. et al. Parameterization improvements and functional and structural advances in Version 4 of the Community Land Model. J. Adv. Model. Earth Syst. 3, M03001 (2011).
Tan, Z. et al. Modeling methane emissions from arctic lakes: Model development and site‐level study. J. Adv. Model. Earth Syst. 6, 513–526 (2015).
Goudsmit, G. H., Burchard, H., Peeters, F. & Wüest, A. Application of k-ϵ turbulence models to enclosed basins: the role of internal seiches. J. Geophys. Res. Oceans 107, 23-1–23-13 (2002).
Bowling, L. C. & Lettenmaier, D. P. Modeling the effects of lakes and wetlands on the water balance of Arctic environments. J. Hydrometeorol. 11, 276–295 (2010).
Stepanenko, V. et al. LAKE 2.0: a model for temperature, methane, carbon dioxide and oxygen dynamics in lakes. Geosci. Model Dev. 9, 1977–2006 (2016).
Kourzeneva, E., Asensio, H., Martin, E. & Faroux, S. Global gridded dataset of lake coverage and lake depth for use in numerical weather prediction and climate modelling. Tellus A 64, 15640 (2012).
Subin, Z. M., Riley, W. J. & Mironov, D. An improved lake model for climate simulations: model structure, evaluation, and sensitivity analyses in CESM1. J. Adv. Model. Earth Syst. 4, M02001 (2012).
Choulga, M., Kourzeneva, E., Zakharova, E. & Doganovsky, A. Estimation of the mean depth of boreal lakes for use in numerical weather prediction and climate modelling. Tellus A 66, 21295 (2014).
Balsamo, G., Dutra, E., Beljaars, A. & Viterbo, P. Evolution of land surface processes in the Integrated Forecast System. ECMWF Newsl. 127, 17–22 (2011).
Ledoit, O. & Wolf, M. A well-conditioned estimator for large-dimensional covariance matrices. J. Multivar. Anal. 88, 365–411 (2004).
Gudmundsson, L., Seneviratne, S. I. & Zhang, X. Anthropogenic climate change detected in European renewable freshwater resources. Nat. Clim. Change 7, 813–816 (2017).
Acknowledgements
We are grateful to the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research (PIK) for initiating and coordinating the ISIMIP initiative, with special thanks to M. Büchner for his oversight of ISIMIP data publishing, and to the modelling centres for making their impact simulations publicly available through ESGF. We acknowledge the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts (ECMWF) and the Copernicus Climate Change Service for their provision of publicly available ERA5-Land lake data; this paper contains modified Copernicus Climate Change Information [2021]. Furthermore, L.Grant is funded by European Copernicus Climate Change Service (C3S) implemented by the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts (ECMWF) under the service contract Independent Assessment on ECVs led by National Research council of Italy (CNR) with the funding number ECMWF/Copernicus/2017/C3S_511_CNR. We owe many thanks to F. Fröb and A. Winkler for sharing their regularized optimal fingerprinting python code and to M. Schmid for the helpful discussions. We also thank the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) for maintaining CLM and making the source code publicly available. I.V. is a research fellow at the Research Foundation Flanders (FWO) (FWOTM920). W.T. acknowledges the Uniscientia Foundation and the ETH Zurich Foundation for their support to this research. Z.T. is supported by the US DOE’s Earth System Modeling programme through the Energy Exascale Earth System Model (E3SM) project. The computational resources and services used in this work were provided by the VSC (Flemish Supercomputer Center), funded by the Research Foundation Flanders (FWO) and the Flemish Government, department EWI. R.M. participated through the project WATExR of the JPI Climate ERA4CS Program and acknowledges funding from the CERCA programme of the Generalitat de Catalunya. V.M.S. and A.V.D. used the HPC facilities of Lomonosov Moscow State University (‘Lomonosov-2’ supercomputer) and were supported by the Russian Ministry of Science and Higher Education, agreement no. 075-152019-1621. A.B.G.J acknowledges the Talent Programme Veni of the Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research (NWO) (VI.Veni.194.002).
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Contributions
L. Grant, I.V. and W.T. designed the study. L. Grant wrote the manuscript with support from all authors and performed all analyses under the supervision of I.V. and W.T. L. Gudmundsson provided guidance on the detection analysis. Z.T., M.P., V.M.S., A.V.D., B.D., A.B.G.J., S.I.S. and W.T. conducted the global lake model simulations. J.S., F.Z., M.G., D.P., R.M. and W.T. coordinated the ISIMIP lake sector activities. M.C. and G.B. helped validate ERA5-Land reanalysis data as reference products. I.V.d.V. provided oversight for data publishing. L. Grant and I.V. performed additional analyses in response to referee comments and together composed the referee response letter with the help of all authors.
Corresponding author
Ethics declarations
Competing interests
The authors declare no competing interests.
Additional information
Peer review information Nature Geoscience thanks Peter Stott, Matthew Hipsey and the other, anonymous, reviewer(s) for their contribution to the peer review of this work. Primary Handling Editor: Thomas Richardson.
Publisher’s note Springer Nature remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations.
Supplementary information
Supplementary Information
Supplementary Table 1, Figs. 1–39, Notes 1.1–1.5 and references.
Rights and permissions
About this article
Cite this article
Grant, L., Vanderkelen, I., Gudmundsson, L. et al. Attribution of global lake systems change to anthropogenic forcing. Nat. Geosci. 14, 849–854 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41561-021-00833-x
Received:
Accepted:
Published:
Issue Date:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/s41561-021-00833-x
- Springer Nature Limited
This article is cited by
-
Major changes in fish thermal habitat diversity in Canada’s Arctic lakes due to climate change
Communications Earth & Environment (2024)
-
Evidence of human influence on Northern Hemisphere snow loss
Nature (2024)
-
Nitrogen and phosphorus trends in lake sediments of China may diverge
Nature Communications (2024)
-
Recent human-induced atmospheric drying across Europe unprecedented in the last 400 years
Nature Geoscience (2024)
-
Population, land use and economic exposure estimates for Europe at 100 m resolution from 1870 to 2020
Scientific Data (2023)