100 years of lake evolution over the Qinghai–Tibet Plateau

Zhang, Guoqing; Ran, Youhua; Wan, Wei; Luo, Wei; Chen, Wenfeng; Xu, Fenglin; Li, Xin

doi:https://doi.org/10.5194/essd-13-3951-2021

Articles | Volume 13, issue 8

https://doi.org/10.5194/essd-13-3951-2021

© Author(s) 2021. This work is distributed under
the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License.

Special issue:

Extreme environment datasets for the three poles

https://doi.org/10.5194/essd-13-3951-2021

© Author(s) 2021. This work is distributed under
the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License.

Articles | Volume 13, issue 8

Data description paper

|

13 Aug 2021

Data description paper |

| 13 Aug 2021

100 years of lake evolution over the Qinghai–Tibet Plateau

Guoqing Zhang, Youhua Ran, Wei Wan, Wei Luo, Wenfeng Chen, Fenglin Xu, and Xin Li

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Final revised paper (published on 13 Aug 2021)
Supplement to the final revised paper
Preprint (discussion started on 22 Apr 2021)
Supplement to the preprint

Interactive discussion

Status: closed

RC1:
'Comment on essd-2021-130', Anonymous Referee #1, 08 Jun 2021

This is a great dataset that expands 100 years for the lakes in Qinghai-Tibet Plateau. I appreciate the authors’ effort to put all these data together in a consistent format and free available to the world. I knew many papers based on the Landsat images have been published, the 1960s data and a few other recent data have been also published, but it is the first time the 1920s data are publishing, also to combine three different types of data into one systematic dataset is awesome. The paper (data together) has revealed a general pattern of lake reduction from the 1920s to 1995, lake expansion from the 1995-2020. This further confirms my thought based on previous data and publications, but not yet published yet. I am very happy this paper did it. the overall writing of the paper is very good, although there are minor grammar/tense errors that can be fixed relatively easy. For example, the paper is primarily written in a present tense, but in some places mixed past and present tenses are used and should be fixed (see line 175 “was” should be “is”).

I do have one comment about the 1920 maps/data. I fully understand that it is impossible to validate the quality and accuracy of the data now. But I hope if any possible to give some details on how they actually mapped such a big area, with little or no current technology,…, in some places, these types of information should be there. I know it is hard to find but just curious. Also although the number of lakes (larger than 1 km2) was only 710, but the total area of these lakes are larger than the 1960s (1107 lakes). My guess would be many small lakes not in their map might be just missed due to the reason they really did not see them during the field work, since it was really a big task to walk through all small lakes (just my thoughts). However, the missing small lakes do not impact their results, since the major and big lakes really contribute to the total lake area, which was indeed larger than 1960s. one curious question is that, have authors checked all the same 710 lakes in the 1920, 1960, 1970, …., 2020? Can you just show the trend and pattern for these 710 lakes? How many lakes in Figure 8?

Figure 6, I see some red outlines, some clearly are the lake boundaries, but others are not. Please make sure they are cleaned…

Line 305, add “due to outburst” behind “a noticeable reduction in area”

Citation: https://doi.org/10.5194/essd-2021-130-RC1
- CC1:
  'Reply on RC1', Guoqin Zhang, 18 Jun 2021
  
  We are grateful to the anonymous reviewer for the constructive comments on our manuscript. We have carefully addressed all the comments (please see the Supplement response file).
  
  Citation: https://doi.org/10.5194/essd-2021-130-CC1
  - RC2: 'Reply on CC1', Anonymous Referee #2, 07 Jul 2021
    
    The paper by Chang et al. deals with change detection of lake coverage on the Qinhai-Tibetan Plateau during the last hundred years. As one commentator already pointed out in the public discussion, this is an amazing paper. I am not so much familiar with GIS approaches, but my impression is that the authors did a sophisticated job and considered all methodic limitations. The results are very impressive and might also be of high value for palaeoclimatologists dealing with ancient lake dynamics. I agree with the public review. In addition, the following issues should be considered in a revised manuscript:
    
    Line 41: Degradation of „thawing“ permafrost; snow and ice melts.
    
    Lines 60-62: „…no studies of lake mapping…“ versus „…have been considered in several studies…“ Sounds like a contradiction, needs rephrasing.
    
    Lines 82-85: The political assignment of geographic terms by countries and the international community sometimes differ. The region not „sometimes“, but „often“ is referred to as Tibetan Plateau. Just use your terminology and definition of the area. This is fine, but rephrasing is needed to understand what you mean.
    
    I generally appreciate the high quality and layout of the illustrations. In Fig. 6, the old shore lines in red and yellow are difficult to note and should be mentioned in the caption.
    
    Causes of lake change are well discussed. Maybe, it is possible to give some values of correlation between climate parameters and average lake parameters (lake numbers, lake area through time). I would also be good to have values for glacial melt-water runoff to substantiate its unimportant role for lake status. Could be added to Figure 10. The latter figure should also include an average curve of lake development.
    
    Citation: https://doi.org/10.5194/essd-2021-130-RC2
    
    AC1: 'Reply on RC2', Guoqing Zhang, 12 Jul 2021
    
    We are grateful to the Reviewer for the constructive comments on our manuscript. We have carefully addressed all the comments (please see the Supplement response file).
    
    Citation: https://doi.org/10.5194/essd-2021-130-AC1

Peer review completion

AR: Author's response | RR: Referee report | ED: Editor decision | EF: Editorial file upload

AR by Guoqing Zhang on behalf of the Authors (15 Jul 2021) Author's response Author's tracked changes Manuscript

ED: Publish subject to technical corrections (18 Jul 2021) by Kirsten Elger

AR by Guoqing Zhang on behalf of the Authors (18 Jul 2021) Manuscript

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Short summary

Lakes can be effective indicators of climate change, especially over the Qinghai–Tibet Plateau. Here, we provide the most comprehensive lake mapping covering the past 100 years. The new features of this data set are (1) its temporal length, providing the longest period of lake observations from maps, (2) the data set provides a state-of-the-art lake inventory for the Landsat era (from the 1970s to 2020), and (3) it provides the densest lake observations for lakes with areas larger than 1 km².