Lakes are of fundamental importance in the Earth system as they support essential environmental and economic services such as freshwater supply. Despite the impact of lakes on the water cycle, they are generally not considered in global hydrological studies. Based on a model called MLake, we assessed both the importance of lakes in simulating river flows at global scale and the value of their level variations for water resource management.

This study presents new strong indications that regions of anomalously low backscatter in C-band synthetic aperture radar (SAR) imagery of ice of lake Neyto in northwestern Siberia are caused by strong emissions of natural gas. Spatio-temporal dynamics and potential scattering and formation mechanisms are assessed. It is suggested that exploiting the spatial and temporal properties of Sentinel-1 SAR data may be beneficial for the identification of similar phenomena in other Arctic lakes.

Antarctica consists most of frozen water, and it makes the continent sensitive to warming due to enhancing a transition/exchange of water from solid (ice and snow) to liquid (lakes and rivers). Therefore, it is important to know how fast is water exchanges in the Antarctic lakes. The study gives first estimates of scales for water exchange for five lakes located in the Larsemann Hills oasis. Two methods are suggested to evaluate the time scale for the lakes depending on their type.

Small lakes are a dominant portion of inland freshwaters, but their response to climate change is rarely addressed. The thermal regime of a small and shallow lake was evaluated over a 6-decade period through hydrodynamic modelling. Significant changes were found: maximum water warming in Spring and Summer (0.7 °C/dec), increased stratification and energy for phytoplankton growth during Spring and Autumn. Such changes, must be considered for appropriate management policies of similar ecosystems.

This work covers multiple 3D simulations of the hydrodynamics of Lake Tanganyika, covering the inter-seasonal variations and the evolution linked to climate change. The research was done with COSMO-CLM² data, which was used to run the SLIM 3D Lake Tanganyika model. The main results explain how this stratified lake can still maintain a certain mixing between the different layers, but how this would come to an end due to climate change.