DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.14202301
title: Lake-TopoCat: A global Lake drainage Topology and Catchment database

description: Contact: Md Safat Sikder (mssikder@illinois.edu), Jida Wang (jidaw@illinois.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 componentsThis version of Lake-TopoCat was constructed using the SWOT Prior Lake Database (PLD) v106 (Wang et al., 2023) lake mask and the 3-arc-second-resolution hydrography dataset MERIT Hydro v1.0.1 (Yamazaki et al., 2019). The drainage type of each PLD 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.

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 5,893,363 PLD lakes, larger than 1 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 5,983,642 outlets for 5,893,363 lakes, where 83,819 lakes (~1.4% 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 85.1 million km2, which is about 63% 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 11 million connecting reaches were generated among ~6 million outlets. The total length of these inter-lake connecting reaches is ~19 million km, which is at least 8.75 times longer than the SWOT-visible river reaches as depicted in the SWOT River Database (SWORD) v16 (Altenau et al., 2021).

     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 108,985 lake-network basins were identified. Among them, endorheic basins account for 2.75% by count and 19.5% by area of all lake-network basins. These endorheic basins cover ~17.5% 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.

 

DisclaimerAuthors of this dataset claim no responsibility or liability for any consequences related to the use, citation, or dissemination of Lake-TopoCat.
description: The work was supported by NASA Surface Water and Ocean Topography (SWOT) Grant (#80NSSC20K1143).