Increasing Water Levels of Global Lakes Between 2003 and 2009

As an essential indicator of climatic and environmental change, water levels of lakes are sensitive to various natural factors and anthropogenic activities from local to global scales. Understanding the global lake water level change can help to uncover the earth’s water resource change and its response to the potential drivers. To date, most studies on lake water level changes were performed at local and regional scales. However, comprehensive information on the magnitude of lake water level changes at a global scale remains poorly understood. Here, with the help of the lake polygons from the global lakes and wetlands database (GLWD) at a global scale, we analyzed all available Ice, Cloud, and Land Elevation Satellite (ICESat) data to estimate the change in water levels of 14 981 lakes with areas greater than 0.1 km2 and reservoirs with storage capacities greater than 0.5 km3 around the world. We found global lakes exhibiting a significant spatial heterogeneity with 58.68% increase and 41.32% decrease in water levels during 2003 and 2009. The average change rate of global lake levels is 0.013 m/yr. We discovered an obvious and broad lake level increase in North America and Siberia region, Tibetan Plateau, and the Amazon basin. Our results provide detailed satellite-based evidence of the global increase in lake levels. In the future, more works should be conducted to estimate the lake level change at a longer temporal scale using multi-source satellite data and investigate the potential drivers under the climate warming and growing human footprint.