The Tibetan Plateau (TP), the highest and largest plateau in the world, with complex and competing cryospheric‐hydrologic‐geodynamic processes, is particularly sensitive to anthropogenic warming. The quantitative water mass budget in the TP is poorly known. Here we examine annual changes in lake area, level, and volume during 1970s–2015. We find that a complex pattern of lake volume changes during 1970s–2015: a slight decrease of −2.78 Gt yr−1 during 1970s–1995, followed by a rapid increase of 12.53 Gt yr−1 during 1996–2010, and then a recent deceleration (1.46 Gt yr−1) during 2011–2015. We then estimated the recent water mass budget for the Inner TP, 2003–2009, including changes in terrestrial water storage, lake volume, glacier mass, snow water equivalent (SWE), soil moisture, and permafrost. The dominant components of water mass budget, namely, changes in lake volume (7.72 ± 0.63 Gt yr−1) and groundwater storage (5.01 ± 1.59 Gt yr−1), increased at similar rates. We find that increased net precipitation contributes the majority of water supply (74%) for the lake volume increase, followed by glacier mass loss (13%), and ground ice melt due to permafrost degradation (12%). Other term such as SWE (1%) makes a relatively small contribution. These results suggest that the hydrologic cycle in the TP has intensified remarkably during recent decades.

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Asia's high plateaus are sensitive to climate change and have been experiencing rapid warming over the past few decades. We found 99 new lakes and extensive lake expansion on the Tibetan Plateau during the last four decades, 1970–2013, due to increased precipitation and cryospheric contributions to its water balance. This contrasts with disappearing lakes and drastic shrinkage of lake areas on the adjacent Mongolian Plateau: 208 lakes disappeared, and 75% of the remaining lakes have shrunk. We detected a statistically significant coincidental timing of lake area changes in both plateaus, associated with the climate regime shift that occurred during 1997/1998. This distinct change in 1997/1998 is thought to be driven by large‐scale atmospheric circulation changes in response to climate warming. Our findings reveal that these two adjacent plateaus have been changing in opposite directions in response to climate change. These findings shed light on the complex role of the regional climate and water cycles and provide useful information for ecological and water resource planning in these fragile landscapes.

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In this paper, 10 years of time-variable gravity data from the Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment Release 05 have been used to evaluate the glacier melting rate in high-mountain Asia (HMA) using a new computing scheme, i.e., the Space Domain Inverse method. We find that in HMA area, there are three different kinds of signal sources that should be treated together. The two generally accepted sources, glacier melting and India underground water depletion, are estimated to change at the rate of À35.0 ± 5.8 Gt/yr (0.09 mm/yr sea level rising) and À30.6 ± 5.0 Gt/yr, respectively. The third source is the remarkable positive signal (+30 Gt/yr) in the inner Tibetan Plateau, which is challenging to explain. Further, we have found that there is a 5 year undulation in Pamir and Karakoram, which can explain the controversies of the previous studies on the glacier melting rate here. This 5 year signal can be explained by the influence of Arctic Oscillation and El Niño-Southern Oscillation.

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The global mean sea level (GMSL) was reported to have dropped 5 mm due to the 2010/2011 La Niña and have recovered in 1 year. With longer observations, it is shown that the GMSL went further up to a total amount of 11.6 mm by the end of 2012, excluding the 3.0 mm/yr background trend. A reconciled sea level budget, based on observations by Argo project, altimeter, and gravity satellites, reveals that the true GMSL rise has been masked by El Niño–Southern Oscillation‐related fluctuations and its rate has increased since 2010. After extracting the influence of land water storage, it is shown that the GMSL has been rising at a rate of 4.4 ± 0.5 mm/yr for more than 3 years, due to an increase in the rate of both land ice loss and steric change.