The extended Global Lake area, Climate, and Population (GLCP) dataset: Extending the GLCP to include ice, snow, and radiation-related climate variables

A changing climate and increasing human population necessitate understanding global freshwater availability. To enable assessment of lake water variability from local-to-global and monthly-to-decadal scales, we extended the Global Lake area, Climate, and Population (GLCP) dataset, which contains monthly lake surface area for 1.42 million lakes with paired basin-level climate and population data from 1995 through 2020. In comparison to the previous version of the GLCP, the extended version is monthly and includes information on lake ice cover as well as basin-level snow area, humidity, longwave and shortwave radiation, and cloud cover. The extended GLCP emphasizes FAIR data principles by expanding its scripting repository and maintaining unique HydroLAKES identifiers, which enables the GLCP to be joined with other HydroLAKES-derived products. Compared to the original version, the extended GLCP contains a richer suite of variables that enable disparate analyses of lake water trends at broad spatial and temporal scales.