Lakes on the Tibetan Plateau experienced rapid changes (mainly expanding) in the past two decades. Here we provide a date set of high temporal resolution and accuracy reflecting changes in water level and storage of Tibetan lakes. A novel source of water levels generated from Landsat archives was validated with in situ data and adopted to resolve the inconsistency in existing studies, benefiting monitoring of lake overflow floods, seasonal and interannual variability and long-term trends.

Freshwater resources are of high societal relevance and understanding their past variability is vital to water management in the context of current and future climatic change. This study introduces GRUN: the first global gridded monthly reconstruction of runoff covering the period from 1902 to 2014. The dataset agrees on average much better with the streamflow observations than an ensemble of 13 state-of-the art global hydrological models and will foster the understanding of freshwater dynamics.