Half of world's largest lakes losing water

More than 50 percent of the largest lakes in the world are losing water, according to a ground breaking new assessment published in Science. The key culprits are not surprising: warming climate and unsustainable human consumption

With this new method of tracking lake water storage trends and the reasons behind them, scientists can give water managers and communities insight into how to better protect critical sources of water and important regional ecosystems.

This is the first comprehensive assessment of trends and drivers of global lake water storage variability based on an array of satellites and models. Author has motivated to do the research by the environmental crises in some of Earth's largest water bodies, such as the drying of the Aral Sea between Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan.

Authors from the University of Colorado Boulder, Kansas State University, France, and Saudi Arabia created a technique to measure changes in water levels in nearly 2,000 of the world's biggest lakes and reservoirs, which represent 95 percent of the total lake water storage on Earth. The team combined three decades of observations from an array of satellites with models to quantify and attribute trends in lake storage globally.