Satellites reveal widespread decline in global lake water storage.

Climate change and human activities increasingly threaten lakes that store 87% of Earth's liquid surface fresh water. Yet, recent trends and drivers of lake volume change remain largely unknown globally. Here, we analyze the 1972 largest global lakes using three decades of satellite observations, climate data, and hydrologic models, finding statistically significant storage declines for 53% of these water bodies over the period 1992-2020.

Lake Chad vegetation cover and surface water variations in response to rainfall fluctuations under recent climate conditions (2000-2020).

Monitoring the evolution of the Sahelian environment is a major challenge because the great Sahelian droughts, marked by significant environmental consequences and social impacts, contributed, for example, to the drying up of Lake Chad. We combined remote sensing images with a water level database from the Hydroweb project to determine the response of Lake Chad vegetation cover and surface water variations to rainfall fluctuations in the Lake Chad watershed under recent climate conditions. The variance in lake surface water levels was determined by computing the monthly anomaly time series of surface water height and area from the Hydroweb datasets.

Water Resources in Africa under Global Change: Monitoring Surface Waters from Space.

Abstract: The African continent hosts some of the largest freshwater systems worldwide, characterized by a large distribution and variability of surface waters that play a key role in the water, energy and carbon cycles and are of major importance to the global climate and water resources. Freshwater availability in Africa has now become of major concern under the combined effect of climate change, environmental alterations and anthropogenic pressure. However, the hydrology of the African river basins remains one of the least studied worldwide and a better monitoring and understanding of the hydrological processes across the continent become fundamental.

Comprehensive estimation of lake volume changes on the Tibetan Plateau during 1976-2019 and basin-wide glacier contribution.

Volume changes and water balances of the lakes on the Tibetan Plateau (TP) are spatially heterogeneous and the lake-basin scale drivers remain unclear. In this study, we comprehensively estimated water volume changes for 1132 lakes larger than 1 km and determined the glacier contribution to lake volume change at basin-wide scale using satellite stereo and multispectral images. Overall, the water mass stored in the lakes increased by 169.

The Lake Chad hydrology under current climate change.

Lake Chad, in the Sahelian zone of west-central Africa, provides food and water to ~50 million people and supports unique ecosystems and biodiversity. In the past decades, it became a symbol of current climate change, held up by its dramatic shrinkage in the 1980s. Despites a partial recovery in response to increased Sahelian precipitation in the 1990s, Lake Chad is still facing major threats and its contemporary variability under climate change remains highly uncertain.