More than 50 percent of the largest lakes in the world are losing water, according to a groundbreaking new assessment published today in Science. The key culprits are not surprising: warming climate and unsustainable human consumption.
But lead author Fangfang Yao, a CIRES visiting fellow, now a climate fellow at University of Virginia, said the news is not entirely bleak. With this new method of tracking lake water storage trends and the reasons behind them, scientists can give water managers and communities insight into how to better protect critical sources of water and important regional ecosystems.
“This is the first comprehensive assessment of trends and drivers of global lake water storage variability based on an array of satellites and models,” Yao said.
Read more at University of Colorado at Boulder
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