Description: This dataset provides decadal changes in total terrestrial water storage (TWS) across global endorheic basins, as observed by the Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment (GRACE) satellites from April 2002 to March 2016. GRACE observations applied here are monthly equivalent water thickness (EWT) anomalies in the JPL 3-degree equal-area mason solution (JPL-RL05M version 2). Endorheic basin extents are acquired from the 15-second HydroSHEDS drainage basin dataset, with regional supplement of the Global Drainage Basin Database (GDBD). The global endorheic basins cover a total area of 33.7 million square kilometers, ranging from 52.8º S to 62.0º N and from 122.8º W to 157.6º E. TWS changes are calculated at two enumeration scales: 173 endorheic units and 10 endorheic zones (including Western North America, Dry Andes and Patagonia, Sahara and Arabia, Great Rift Valley and Southern Africa, Australia, Central Eurasia, and four secondary zones in Central Eurasia: the Caspian Sea Basin, the Aral Sea Basin, the Inner Tibetan Plateau, and Other Central Eurasia). At the unit scale, we provide 1) the trend of deseasonalized TWS anomalies from April 2002 to March 2016 and, 2) the trend uncertain (one standard deviation) propagated from the inherent errors in the original mascon data and the residuals of the best-fit linear trend fitting. At the zonal scale, we provide detailed monthly time series of 1) TWS anomalies (both original values and deseasonalized values) and 2) TWS uncertainties propagated from the inherent mason errors and rescaling uncertainties due to signal leakage in fringe mascons. Please see the source paper (Wang et al. 2018) for detailed data references, collections and processing.

Description: Alpine lakes in the interior of Tibet, the endorheic Changtang Plateau (CP), serve as "sentinels" of regional climate change. Recent studies indicated that accelerated climate change has driven a widespread area expansion in lakes across the CP, but comprehensive and accurate quantifications of their storage changes are hitherto rare. This study integrated optical imagery and digital elevation models to uncover the fine spatial details of lake water storage (LWS) changes across the CP at an annual timescale after the new millennium (from 2002 to 2015). Validated by hypsometric information based on long-term altimetry measurements, our estimated LWS variations outperform some existing studies with reduced estimation biases and improved spatiotemporal coverages. The net LWS increased at an average rate of 7.34 (±0.62) Gt yr-1 (cumulatively 95.42 (±8.06) Gt), manifested as a dramatic monotonic increase of 9.05 (±0.65) Gt yr-1 before 2012, a deceleration and pause in 2013-2014, and then an intriguing decline after 2014. Observations from the Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment satellites (GRACE) reveal that the LWS pattern is in remarkable agreement with that of the regional mass changes: a net effect of precipitation minus evapotranspiration (P-ET) in endorheic basins. Despite some regional variations, P-ET explains ~70% of the net LWS gain from 2002 to 2012 and the entire LWS loss after 2013. These findings clearly suggest that the water budget from net precipitation (i.e., P-ET) dominates those of glacier melt and permafrost degradation, and thus acts as the primary contributor to recent lake area/volume variations in the endorheic Tibet.