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

Abstract

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 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 77.5×106 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 (Yamazaki et al., 2019), stretching a total distance of ∼10×106 km, of which ∼ 80 % are shorter than 10 km. With such unprecedented lake hydrography details, Lake-TopoCat contributes towards a globally coupled lake–river routing model. It may also facilitate a variety of limnological applications such as attributing water quality from lake scale to basin scale, tracing inter-lake fish migration due to changing climate, monitoring fluvial–lacustrine connectivity, and improving estimates of terrestrial carbon fluxes. Lake-TopoCat is freely accessible at https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.7916729 (Sikder et al., 2023).

Reservoir Filling Up Problems in a Changing Climate: Insights From CryoSat‐2 Altimetry

“…Reservoir capacity was from the Global Reservoir and Dam Database (GRanD) (Lehner et al., 2011). Moreover, the associated drainage topology and catchment database (TopoCat) (Sikder et al., 2023) was also used for further analyses.…”

Refined understanding of hydrological connectivity among lakes on the Qiangtang Plateau

“…This comparison uncovered generally similar catchment areas across the majority of cases (Figure S8 in Supporting Information S1), although Liu et al (2022) reported generally larger catchments. This discrepancy might stem from MERIT Hydro's uniform application of a 2.5 million km³ threshold for pseudo-depression correction (Sikder et al, 2023). While this threshold may be suitable for global assessments, it could possibly misclassify real depressions on the QP, leading to overestimated lake connectivity by mistakenly merging separate catchments.…”

The Surface Water and Ocean Topography Mission (SWOT) Prior Lake Database (PLD): Lake mask and operational auxiliaries

“…As water dynamics in a lake are confined by its own catchment boundary, this rationale complies with the ideal definition of lake assignment polygons described above. To implement this rationale, we applied the algorithm recently developed for the global Lake Topology and Catchment (Lake-TopoCat) database (Sikder et al, 2023) on the prior lake mask and the 90-m-resolution MERIT-Hydro hydrography data (Yamazaki et al, 2019). Results of the algorithm are fine-detailed catchments for each of the prior lakes, which compose the geometries of the "lake_catchment" table.…”