The Extended Global Lake area, Climate, and Population Dataset (GLCP)

A changing climate and increasing human population necessitate understanding global freshwater availability and temporal variability. To examine lake freshwater availability from local-to-global and monthly-to-decadal scales, we created the Global Lake area, Climate, and Population (GLCP) dataset, which contains annual lake surface area for 1.42 million lakes with paired annual basin-level climate and population data. Building off an existing data product infrastructure, the next generation of the GLCP includes monthly lake ice area, snow basin area, and more climate variables including specific humidity, longwave and shortwave radiation, as well as cloud cover. The new generation of the GLCP continues previous FAIR data efforts by expanding its scripting repository and maintaining unique relational keys for merging with external data products. Compared to the original version, the new GLCP contains an even richer suite of variables capable of addressing disparate analyses of lake water trends at wide spatial and temporal scales.