Imbalance in lake variability but not embodying driving factors on the Qinghai-Tibetan Plateau calls on heterogeneous lake management.

Comprehensive regional remote analysis tends to neglect lakes in exorheic basins on the Qinghai-Tibetan Plateau (QTP), and a concurrent lack of discussions on whether there exist imbalanced explanations for the driving forces of both internal and external lakes is also present. We integrate multisourced lake datasets, high-resolution information, and available altimetry datasets to establish multiple mathematical models to meta-simulate lake volume changes, extend current lake variation datasets, and quantify the imbalance of variations and factors driving the water mass budget. The results showed that the primary cause of lake variations in QTP is net precipitation (57.75 ± 31.46%), followed by glacier runoff (33.53 ± 31.42%), and permafrost (8.34 ± 7.87%). Even though glacier runoff is currently considered as a weak factor of lake variation, heterogeneous results call for remaining attention in glacier-induced lake basins. Imbalance embodying in lake variability but not in contributions of driving factors, which calls for special lake management ways in different watersheds.