Water clarity annual dynamics (1984–2018) dataset across China derived from Landsat images in Google Earth Engine

Abstract. Water clarity provides a sensitive tool to examine spatial pattern and historical trend in lakes trophic status. Yet, this metric has insufficiently been explored despite the availability of remotely-sensed data. We used three Secchi disk depth (SDD) datasets for model calibration and validation from different field campaigns mainly conducted during 2004–2018. The red/blue band ratio algorithm was applied to map SDD for lakes (> 1 ha) based on the first SDD dataset, where R2 = 0.79, RMSE = 100.3 cm, rRMSE = 61.9 %, MAE = 57.7 cm. The other two datasets were used to validate the SDD estimation model, which were indicated the model had a stable performance of temporal transferability. The annual mean SDD of lakes were retrieved across China using Landsat top of air reflectance products in GEE from 1984 to 2018. The spatiotemporal dynamics of SDD were analysed at the five lake regions and individual lake scales, and the average, changing trend, lake number and area, and spatial distribution of lake SDDs across China were presented. In 2018, we found that the lakes with SDDs  4 m were the largest, accounting for 48.28 % of the total lakes. During 1984–2018, lakes in the Tibetan-Qinghai Plateau lake region (TQR) had the clearest water with an average value of 3.32 ± 0.38 m, while that in the Northeastern lake region (NLR) exhibited the lowest SDD (mean: 0.60 ± 0.09 m). Among the 10,814 lakes with SDD results more than 10 years, 55.42 % and 3.49 % of lakes experienced significant increasing and decreasing trends, respectively. At the five lake regions, except for the Inner Mongolia-Xinjiang lake region (MXR), more than half of the total lakes in every other lake region exhibited significant increasing trends. In the Eastern lake region (ELR), NLR and Yungui Plateau lake region (YGR), almost more than 50 % of the lakes that displayed an increase or decrease in SDD were mainly distributed in an area of 0.01–1 km2, whereas that in the TQR and MXR were primarily concentrated in large lakes (> 10 km2). Spatially, lakes located in the plateau regions generally exhibited higher SDD than those situated in the flat plain regions. The dataset can now be accessed through the website of the National Tibetan Plateau Data Center ( http://data.tpdc.ac.cn ): DOI: 10.11888/Hydro.tpdc.271571 .