Catchment characteristics dominate the hydrological behavior of closed lakes across the Tibetan Plateau

Naturally closed lakes located on the Tibetan Plateau provide a more authentic depiction of climate change and have undergone significant but dissimilar changes over the past four decades. Although previous research has concentrated on closed lake changes at regional and continental scales, the dominant factors related to closed lakes at the catchment scale remain elusive. This study employed the hierarchical minimum variance clustering method, six representative topographies and land surface descriptors to classify the catchments of 322 closed lakes (>1 km2) across the Tibetan Plateau from 1981 to 2020. To better understand the factors driving the changes in catchment-scale lake areas, we assigned two distinct attribute classes to the resulting classifications: hydro-meteorological characteristics and geographical environmental aspects. Our analysis revealed that five clusters are geographically coherent and exhibit distinct hydro-meteorological characteristics. By assessing decadal-scale changes in catchment characteristics over time for lakes in five clusters with area change of greater than ± 50 %, we found that the most significant driver of catchment changes from 1981 to 2000 was a continuous decline in snowmelt, followed by a substantial increase in precipitation, temperature, and glacial meltwater from 2000 to 2020. Regarding trends and magnitude, different lake area responses may occur in areas with similar physical geography and climatology (i.e., the same cluster). During the past four decades, only 3 % of lakes (19) shrank in area and decreased in change rate. Also, intense evaporation corresponds to a period of decrease in lake area. Despite the variation in lake area change among clusters, precipitation dominates the inconsistent increase in lake area under similar physical geography and climatology, with some exceptions strongly related to groundwater and melted permafrost recharge. Our findings have laid the groundwork for understanding this region's catchment characteristics and the resulting complex hydrological behavior.