Monitoring of Surface Water Area and Water Level Changes in Nine Plateau Lakes in Yunnan and Analysis of Influencing Factors

The lakes on the Yunnan-Guizhou Plateau, located in a unique geographical position with distinctive lake structures, are crucial factors influencing the regional ecological environment. The lake area and water level, as significant parameters reflecting lake variations, have become key indicators for global or regional climate and environmental changes under the influence of climate and human activities. In this study, based on the Google Earth Engine (GEE) platform, we extracted the annual changes in surface water area during the dry and rainy seasons for the nine major plateau lakes in Yunnan Province from 2003 to 2022. Simultaneously, using a multi-source remote sensing data fusion method, we extracted the water levels during the dry and rainy seasons for the same lakes in the same year, with the extraction results showing a consistent deviation within 0.3 meters compared to the measured water levels. The experimental results indicate that the surface water area and volume of Yunnan’s plateau lakes have remained relatively stable over the past two decades, but have been significantly impacted by the prolonged drought in Yunnan from 2008 to 2014. Four fundamental driving factors were selected for correlation analysis, exploring the impact of regional climate change and human activities on the water variations of Yunnan’s plateau lakes.