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BRIEF RESEARCH REPORT article

Front. Environ. Sci.
Sec. Environmental Informatics and Remote Sensing
Volume 12 - 2024 | doi: 10.3389/fenvs.2024.1450320

Long-term trends in water transparency of Tibetan Plateau lakes and the response to extreme climate events

Provisionally accepted
Wangming Liu Wangming Liu Huan Xu Huan Xu *Guowei He Guowei He
  • Shaanxi Railway Institute, Shaanxi, China

The final, formatted version of the article will be published soon.

    Water transparency, as indicated by the Secchi disk depth (Zsd), is a key parameter for assessing the quality of aquatic environments, reflecting the ability of light to penetrate through the water column. In the Tibetan Plateau (TP), where lakes are abundant yet remote and challenging to access, remote sensing techniques offer a promising approach for monitoring Zsd over large spatial scales. In this study, we used the semianalytical -based Zsd algorithm to study the temporal and spatial dynamics of water transparency over TP during the period from 2003 to 2022. The results show that the 173 lakes have a mean value of Zsd is 3.64±2.4 m for long term, and generally with the significantly increasing change trends in the past 20 years. In the central Tibetan Plateau (CTP) region, lake transparency showed a positive correlation with lake surface temperature (r = 0.73) and a negative correlation with precipitation (r = -0.54), highlighting the region's heightened sensitivity to meteorological changes compared to other areas. The spike in water clarity observed in the CTP region may be linked to alterations in lake hydrodynamics driven by the extremely climate events (i.e., El Niño). These results indicated the importance of considering regional climatic factors when interpreting fluctuations in water transparency.

    Keywords: water transparency1, MODIS2, Tibetan Plateau3, alpine lakes4, Climate Change5

    Received: 17 Jun 2024; Accepted: 03 Sep 2024.

    Copyright: © 2024 Liu, Xu and He. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.

    * Correspondence: Huan Xu, Shaanxi Railway Institute, Shaanxi, China

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