Domino effect of a natural cascade alpine lake system on the Third Pole.

Third Pole natural cascade alpine lakes (NCALs) are exceptionally sensitive to climate change, yet the underlying cryosphere-hydrological processes and associated societal impacts are largely unknown. Here, with a state-of-the-art cryosphere-hydrology-lake-dam model, we quantified the notable high-mountain Hoh-Xil NCALs basin (including Lakes Zonag, Kusai, Hedin Noel, and Yanhu, from upstream to downstream) formed by the Lake Zonag outburst in September 2011. We demonstrate that long-term increased precipitation and accelerated ice and snow melting as well as short-term heavy precipitation and earthquake events were responsible for the Lake Zonag outburst; while the permafrost degradation only had a marginal impact on the lake inflows but was crucial to lakeshore stability.

Study on air temperature estimation and its influencing factors in a complex mountainous area.

Near-surface air temperature (Ta) is an important parameter in agricultural production and climate change. Satellite remote sensing data provide an effective way to estimate regional-scale air temperature. Therefore, taking Gansu section of the upper Weihe River Basin as the study area, using the filtered reconstructed high-quality long-time series normalized difference vegetation index (NDVI), interpolated reconstructed land surface temperature (LST), surface albedo, and digital elevation model (DEM) as the input data, the back-propagation artificial neural network algorithm (BP-ANN) was combined with a multiple linear regression method to estimate regional air temperature, and the influencing factors of air temperature estimation were analyzed.