Annual Thermokarst Lake and Major River Mapping on the Tibetan Plateau (2020–2025)

The data were derived by synergistic use of Sentinel-1 synthetic aperture radar (SAR) backscatter and Sentinel-2 multispectral reflectance observations. A feature fusion framework was employed that integrates the Normalized Difference Water Index (NDWI) from optical imagery with backscatter-derived water indicators from radar observations.

Water features were delineated using adaptive thresholding and morphological post-processing. The outputs represent the first consistent, multi-year, high-resolution surface water dataset for the TP focusing explicitly on thermokarst lake dynamics and fluvial systems under ongoing climate warming. The dataset has wide applications in cryosphere research, hydrological modeling, permafrost monitoring, and ecological assessments.