Lake-TopoCat: A global Lake drainage Topology and Catchment database

Contact: Md Safat Sikder (msikder@ksu.edu), Jida Wang (jidawang@ksu.edu; gdbruins@ucla.edu)

Citation

If you use Lake-TopoCat, please cite the following paper:

Sikder, M. S., Wang, J., Allen, G. H., Sheng, Y., Yamazaki, D., Song, C., Ding, M., Crétaux, J.-F., and Pavelsky, T. M., 2023. Lake-TopoCat: A global lake drainage topology and catchment dataset. Earth System Science Data, 15, 3483-3511, https://doi.org/10.5194/essd-15-3483-2023

Data description and components
This version of Lake-TopoCat was constructed using the HydroLAKES v1.0 (Messager et al., 2016) lake mask and the 3-arc-second-resolution hydrography dataset MERIT Hydro v1.0.1 (Yamazaki et al., 2019). The drainage type of each HydroLAKES lake, such as isolated, inflow-headwater, headwater, flow-through, terminal, and coastal, was determined with assistance of MERIT Hydro-Vector (Lin et al., 2021), a high-resolution river network dataset with spatially-variable drainage densities. Furthermore, the seasonal or intra-annual stability of water area in each HydroLAKES lake was calculated using six-year (2010–2015) statistics from the Global Lake area, Climate, and Population (GLCP) database (Meyer et al., 2020).

For convenience, the global landmass (excluding Antarctica) was partitioned to 68 Pfafstetter Level-2 basins or regions, and the Lake-TopoCat data products were also organized based on these 68 regions, with their region or basin IDs shown in the Fig. 'Pfaf2_basins.jpg', attached to this database.

Lake-TopoCat consists of five feature components, each with multiple attributes depicting lake drainage relationships. The five features are:

1. Lake boundaries: polygons of 1,426,967 HydroLAKES lakes, larger than 10 ha.

     File name: Lakes_pfaf_xx           where, 'pfaf_xx' indicates the Pfafstetter Level-2 basin ID (shown in Fig. 'Pfaf2_basins.jpg')

2. Lake outlets: points representing outlet or pour points of each individual lake. There are multiple outlets from a multifurcation lake. We identified 1,459,201 outlets for 1,426,967 lakes, where 29,190 lakes (~2% of the global lakes) show bi/multifurcation.

     File name: Outlets_pfaf_xx

3. Unit catchment: boundary polygons of catchment defining the drainage areas between cascading (i.e., immediately upstream and downstream) lake outlets. The count of unit catchments equal to the count of lake outlets, and bifurcation or multifurcation lakes have multiple local catchments. In total, the delineated catchments in Lake-TopoCat cover about 77.5 million km2, which is about 57% of the Earth’s land mass excluding the Antarctic.

     File name: Catchments_pfaf_xx

4. Inter-lake reaches: line features defining the drainage networks that connect the lake outlets to the inland sinks or the ocean. About 3 million connecting reaches were generated among ~1.4 million outlets. The total length of these inter-lake connecting reaches is ~10 million km.

     File name: Reaches_pfaf_xx

5. Lake-network basins: boundary polygons of the entire drainage area containing each inter-lake network (i.e., a complete basin from the headwater to an inland sink or the ocean for all basins containing lakes). A total of 47,340 lake-network basins were identified. Among them, endorheic basins account for 5.1% by count and 18% by area of all lake-network basins. These endorheic basins cover ~15.4% of global surface excluding Antarctica.

     File name: Basins_pfaf_xx

The attribute tables for each of the feature components are explained in Section 4 of the product description document. For user convenience, we release the preliminary Lake-TopoCat lake outlets, unit catchments, and inter-lake reaches, with the affix '_prelim' in the file names (explained in the attached product description document). We also provide the polygon boundaries of the 68 Pfafstetter basins or regions in the file named 'Pfaf2_regions'. All files of Lake-TopoCat are available in both shapefile and geodatabase formats.

Disclaimer
Authors of this dataset claim no responsibility or liability for any consequences related to the use, citation, or dissemination of Lake-TopoCat.