Lake water storage estimation method based on similar characteristics of above-water and underwater topography

As the main supply of water for human activity, lakes make up 87% of all the liquid freshwater on the surface of the Earth and are essential to ecosystems. Water storage is a crucial characteristic in lake hydrological processes, with applications in scientific disciplines such as lake nutrient control, underwater aquatic evaluation, and so on. Due to environmental factors, including expenses associated with monitoring, and natural environmental circumstances, it is unknown how much water is stored in total within majority of lakes across the world. Based on the presumption of topographical continuity above and below the water’s surface, this study presents a 3-dimensional (3-D) lake topography simulation approach to estimate water storage via the use of a digital elevation model (DEM) of the lake basin. To assess the accuracy of this method, samples from twelve lakes on the Qinghai-Tibet Plateau were examined using collected underwater data. In the studied lakes, the findings showed a relative error of −11.99% for the total water storage simulation, with average and maximum relative errors for water depth of −19.50% and −5.64%, respectively. This approach, which simply needs the use of DEM data, makes it possible to estimate water storage in areas where there is little to no documented subsurface topography data.