MODIS MOD09Q1 derived lake water surface dataset of the Qinghai-Tibet Plateau (2000 – 2012)

Tibetan Plateau has the largest number and size of inland lakes that located in the highest elevation on earth. Under the background of global warming, the spatio-temporal change process of these huge numbers and size of lakes are hot issues for researches of climate and environment changes in the plateau. However, impacted by the lack of spatio-temporal continuous lake dynamic dataset, the past researches did not clearly characterize the inter-annual and annual lakes’ variation rules. This paper introduced and released the lake water surface data set (8-day with 250 m spatial resolution) of Tibetan Plateau (Qinghai province and Tibet autonomous region) during the period of 2000 – 2012, which derived from the MODIS MOD09Q1 products by using the multistage segmentation and lake by lake automatic threshold determining extraction method. The total accuracy of the data set is 93.98%. The accuracy of cross comparison with other similar products and research results is higher than 86%. The data set accurately reflects the inter-annual and annual variation characteristics of lake water surface in the plateau during the past 10 years. The data set can be directly used to study the dynamic changes of the lake water in the plateau, but also can be used as input to the land surface process model or the regional climate model to study the role of lake water dynamic change in the regional hydrological and climate system.