Description: The Yangtze River Basin downstream of China's Three Gorges Dam (TGD) (thereafter referred to as "downstream" basin) hosts the largest cluster of freshwater lakes in East Asia. These lakes are crucial water stocks to local biophysical environments and socioeconomic development. Existing studies document that individual lakes in this region have recently experienced dramatic changes under the context of enduring meteorological drought, continuous population growth, and extensive water regulation since TGD's initial impoundment (i.e., June, 2003). However, spatial and temporal patterns of lake dynamics across the complete downstream Yangtze basin remain poorly characterized. Using daily MODIS imagery and an advanced thematic mapping scheme, this study presents a comprehensive monitoring of area dynamics in the downstream lake system at a 10-day temporal resolution during 2000-2011. The studied lakes constitute ~76% (~11,400 km**2) of the total downstream lake area, including the entire +70 major lakes larger than 20 km**2. The results reveal a decadal net decline in lake inundation area across the downstream Yangtze Basin, with a cumulative decrease of 849 km**2 or 7.4% from 2000 to 2011. Despite an excessive precipitation anomaly in the year 2010, the decreasing trend was tested significant in all seasons. The most substantial decrease in the post-TGD period appears in fall (1.1%/yr), which intriguingly coincides with the TGD water storage season. Regional lake dynamics exhibit contrasting spatial patterns, manifested as evident decrease and increase of aggregated lake areas respectively within and beyond the Yangtze Plain. This contrast suggests a marked vulnerability of lakes in the Yangtze Plain, to not only local meteorological variability but also intensified human water regulations from both the upstream Yangtze main stem (e.g., the TGD) and tributaries (e.g., lakes/reservoirs beyond the Yangtze Plain). The produced lake mapping result and derived lake area dynamics across the downstream Yangtze Basin provides a crucial monitoring basis for continuous investigations of changing mechanisms in the Yangtze lake system.

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.