Lake-TopoCat: A global lake drainage topology and catchment database

Abstract. Lakes and reservoirs are ubiquitous across global landscapes, functioning as the largest repository of liquid surface freshwater, hotspots of carbon cycling, and “sentinels” of climate change. Although typically considered as lentic (hydrologically stationary) environments, lakes are an integral part of global drainage networks. Through perennial and intermittent hydrological connections, lakes often communicate with each other, and these connections actively affect water mass, quality, and energy balances in both lacustrine and fluvial systems. Deciphering how global lakes are hydrologically interconnected, or the so-called “lake drainage topology”, is not only important to lake change attribution, but also increasingly critical to discharge, sediment, and carbon modeling. Despite the proliferation of river hydrography data, lakes remain poorly represented in routing models, partially because there has been no global-scale hydrography dataset tailored to lake drainage basins and networks. Here, we introduce the global Lake drainage Topology and Catchment database, or “Lake-TopoCat”, which reveals detailed lake hydrography information with a careful consideration of possible multifurcation. Lake-TopoCat contains the outlet(s) and catchment(s) of each lake, the inter-connecting reaches among lakes, and a wide suite of attributes depicting lake drainage topology such as upstream and downstream relationship, drainage distance between lakes, and a priori drainage type and connectivity with river networks. Using the HydroLAKES (v1.0) global lake mask, the Lake-TopoCat v1.0 identifies ~1.46 million outlets for ~1.43 million lakes larger than 10 ha and delineates 77.5 million km² of lake catchments covering 57 % of the Earth’s landmass except Antarctica. The global lakes are interconnected by ~3 million reaches, derived from MERIT Hydro (v1.0.1), stretching a total distance of ~10 million km, ~80 % of which are shorter than 10 km. With such unprecedented lake hydrography details, Lake-TopoCat may facilitate a variety of limnological applications including water quality diagnosis, agriculture and fisheries, lacustrine connectivity monitoring, and integrated lake-river modeling. It is freely accessible at https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.7420810 (Sikder et al., 2022).