Worldwide lake level trends and responses to background climatevariation

Abstract. Lakes provide many important benefits to society including drinking water, flood attenuation, nutrition, and recreation. Anthropogenic environmental changes may affect these benefits by altering lake water levels. However, background climate oscillations such as the El Nino Southern Oscillation, and the North Atlantic Oscillation can obscure long-term trends in water levels, creating uncertainty over the strength and ubiquity of anthropogenic effects on lakes. Here we account for the effects of background climate variation and test for long-term (1992–2019) trends in water levels in 117 globally-distributed large lakes using satellite altimetry data. On average, 27 % of water level variation in individual lakes was associated with background climate variation. The relative influence of specific axes of background climate variation on water levels varied substantially across and within regions. After removing the effects of background climate variation on water levels, long-term water level trend estimates were lower (+1.0 cm year−1) than calculated from raw water level data (+1.4 cm year−1). However, the trends became more statistically significant in 76 % of lakes after removing the effects of background climate variation (the median p-value of trends changed from 0.12 to 0.02). Thus, robust tests for long-term trends in lake water levels which may or may not be anthropogenic will require prior isolation and removal of the effects of background climate variation. Our findings suggest that background climate variation often masks long-term trends in environmental variables, but can be accounted for through more comprehensive statistical analyses.