Lake variations in response to climate change in the Tibetan Plateau in the past 40 years  

作　　者：Jingjuan Liao Guozhuang Shen Yingkui Li 

机构地区：[1]Center for Earth Observation and Digital Earth,Chinese Academy of Sciences,Beijing,China [2]Department of Geography,University of Tennessee,Knoxville,USA

出　　处：《International Journal of Digital Earth》2013年第6期534-549,共16页国际数字地球学报（英文）

基　　金：This research is supported by the National Basic Research Program of China(973 Program,Grant No.2009CB723906)。

摘　　要：The Qinghai-Tibetan Plateau plays an important role in global climate and environmental change and holds the largest lake area in China,with a total surface area of 36,900 km^(2).The expansion and shrinkage of these lakes are critical to the water cycle and ecological and environmental systems across the plateau.In this paper,surface areas of major lakes within the plateau were extracted based on a topographic map from 1970,and Landsat MSS,TM and ETM+satellite images from the 1970s to 2008.Then,a multivariate correlation analysis was conducted to examine the relationship between the changes in lake surface areas and the changes in climatic variables including temperature,precipitation,evaporation,and sunshine duration.Initial results suggest that the variations in lake surface areas within the plateau are closely related to the warming,humidified climate transition in recent years such as the rise of air temperature and the increase in precipitation.In particular,the rising temperature accelerates melting of glaciers and perennial snow cover and triggers permafrost degradation,and leads to the expansion of most lakes across the plateau.In addition,different distributions and types of permafrost may cause different lake variations in the southern Tibetan Plateau.

关 键 词：lake variation climate change Qinghai-Tibetan Plateau 

分 类 号：P46[天文地球—大气科学及气象学]