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

• Published in: Earth System Science Data
• Main Authors: M. S. Sikder, J. Wang, G. H. Allen, Y. Sheng, D. Yamazaki, C. Song, M. Ding, J.-F. Crétaux, T. M. Pavelsky
• Format: Article in Journal/Newspaper
• Language: English
• Published: Copernicus Publications 2023
• Subjects: Environmental sciences; GE1-350; Geology; QE1-996.5; Antarc*; Antarctica
• Online Access: https://doi.org/10.5194/essd-15-3483-2023; https://doaj.org/article/d17a7f6b97aa4ecba60bde2c29da411c

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 lentic (hydrologically stationary) environments, lakes are an integral part of global drainage networks. Through perennial and intermittent hydrological connections, lakes often interact 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 for lake change attribution but also increasingly critical for 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 (Lake-TopoCat), which reveals detailed lake hydrography information with careful consideration of possible multifurcation. Lake-TopoCat contains the outlet(s) and catchment(s) of each lake; the interconnecting 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 (Messager et al., 2016) global lake mask, Lake-TopoCat identifies ∼ 1.46 million outlets for ∼ 1.43 million lakes larger than 10 ha and delineates 77.5×10 6 km 2 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 (Yamazaki et al., 2019), stretching a total distance of ∼ 10 × 10 6 <svg:svg xmlns:svg="http://www.w3.org/2000/svg" width="52pt" height="14pt" class="svg-formula" ...