High Mountain Asia Lake Water Level Dataset from CryoSat‑2 and ICESat‑2
High Mountain Asia (HMA) host one of the largest concentrations of lakes globally, which together with snow and ice reserves, serve as an essential water resource for the region. Due to the limited human disturbances these high-altitude lakes serve as sensitive indicators of climate change impacts. However, their vast number, remote location, and challenging mountainous terrain make in-situ measurements scarce. Satellite altimetry offers a unique opportunity to continuously monitor lake water level variation across HMA. Here we present a water level timeseries for 238 lakes (≥ 20 km2) across HMA derived from CryoSat-2 (2010-2023) and ICESat-2 (2018-2024). Water level timeseries from the two independent altimetry missions shows strong consistency with 80% of lakes exhibiting statistically significant agreement in their signals (p = 0.013). The dataset is structured as a single netCDF file with a two-dimensional matrix format, including water level measurements, associated uncertainties, mission identifiers, ice flags, and static lake attributions (location, area). The water level datasets presented enables long-term trend analysis, changes in lake water storage, response to wet-and-dry climate cycles. The dataset also provides essential variables to study relationships between lake ecosystems and changes in the water resources across HMA.
Simple
- Date ( Publication )
- 2026-06-16
- Purpose
- To provide water level time series data for 238 lakes across High Mountain Asia (HMA) derived using satellite altimetry data from CryoSat‑2 (2010 – 2023) and ICESat‑2 (2018 – 2024)
- Status
- Completed
- Maintenance and update frequency
- As needed
- ( Theme )
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- lake level change
- satellite altimetry
- climate change
- hydrology
- cryosphere
- Keywords ( Place )
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- High Mountain Asia
- Use limitation
- Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0)
- Access constraints
- License
- Use constraints
- License
- Metadata language
- eng
- Character set
- UTF8
- Topic category
-
- Geoscientific information
N
S
E
W
- Reference system identifier
- WGS 1984
Distributor
- OnLine resource
-
Rising Lake Levels Across High Mountain Asia
(
WWW:LINK-1.0-http--link
)
Associated paper
- Hierarchy level
- Feature
- File identifier
- 13351e7a-89ea-4b4e-a331-df092be8bc4d XML
- Metadata language
- eng
- Character set
- UTF8
- Hierarchy level
- Dataset
- Date stamp
- 2026-06-18T14:28:02
- Metadata standard name
- North American Profile of ISO 19115:2003
Metadata Catalogue