A continuous dataset for the lakes in the Hindu Kush Himalayas and Tibetan Plateau from the 1970s through 2020

The Third Pole, encompassing the Hindu Kush Himalayas (HKH), and the Tibetan Plateau (TP), is one of the world’s most sensitive regions to climate change. The region nourishes numerous lakes as a valuable indicator of environmental changes. Although several lake datasets for the region already exist, high-resolution lake dataset, especially the inclusion of small lakes are largely lacking. Based on free satellite images collected from NASA and ESA, we provided a year-by-year lake dataset (including all the lakes > 0.0036 km2) for the Hindu Kush Himalayas and Tibetan Plateau for the period from the 1970s to 2020. We also divided the entire regions into 9 Asian headwater regions and the TP Interior for further detailed verifications at basin level. Our dataset is quantitatively consistent with previous investigation results. The results indicated that our dataset can serve as an input for further verifications of various phenomenon related to climate change in the HKH and TP. There are two files for this dataset, including the 'lake_data' file and a 'Readme' file.