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Local background climate determining the dynamics of plateau lakes in China

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Abstract

Lakes under natural conditions are potential indicators of climate change, but limited evidence has been proposed to explicitly explain the mechanisms of large-scale lake changes associated with climate. In this paper, satellite imageries from the 1970s to 2010 were compared to track the dynamic change patterns of plateau lakes. It aims to identify the forcing of climate change on the lakes in plateau regions of China. Results revealed that: (1) widespread expanding trends in the area and abundance of lakes on wetter plateau regions, by increasing precipitation and snow presented a positive effect on lake levels, as well as warming resulted glacier melting and permafrost degrading contributed to expansion of lakes in the regions covered by glaciers on the Tibetan Plateau by 58–62 % and of 13–20 % on the western Inner Mongolia and Xinjiang Plateau; (2) shrinkage lakes in the main portion of the arid regions were mainly caused by the decreasing wind speed resulted water balance change, irrigation and other human utilization of water resources. Although precipitation decreased, wind speed also has the most dominant impact on decreasing evaporation, followed by solar radiation, both of which offset the effect of increasing temperature, especially in eastern Inner Mongolia and Xinjiang Plateau; (3) thawing permafrost led to shrinkage of lakes in an area of seasonal permafrost, the shrinking and splitting of lakes in a discontinuous permafrost zone, and the rising of lake levels in an area of continuous permafrost; (4) the future of the plateau lakes under climate change must be in question, because the glacier and snow melting water is not sustainable for wetter regions, and the increasing water consumption caused by the farmland expansion for arid regions.

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Acknowledgments

This work was supported by the National Key Technology Research and Development Program in China (2013BAC03B00), Key Deployment Project of Chinese Academy of Sciences (KJZD-EW-TZ-G10) and the Western Project Program of the Chinese Academy of Sciences (KZCX2-XB3-08-01). We thank anonymous reviewers for their comments.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. State Key Laboratory of Resources and Environmental Information System, Institute of Geographical Sciences and Natural Resources Research, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing, China

    Lin Huang & Xinliang Xu

  2. Key Laboratory of Land Surface Pattern and Simulation, Institute of Geographic Sciences and Natural Resources Research, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing, China

    Lin Huang

  3. Satellite Environment Center, Ministry of Environmental Protection, Beijing, China

    Jun Zhai

  4. National Climate Center, China Meteorological Administration, Beijing, China

    Chaoyang Sun

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  1. Lin Huang
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  2. Xinliang Xu
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  3. Jun Zhai
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Correspondence to Xinliang Xu.

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Editor: Erika Coppola.

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Huang, L., Xu, X., Zhai, J. et al. Local background climate determining the dynamics of plateau lakes in China. Reg Environ Change 16, 2457–2470 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10113-016-0963-x

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