[Insert Figure 8 here]

3.6 Associations of TP lake level and precipitation changes with El Niño/La Niña events

We further found the potential associations of lake and precipitation variations on the TP with El Niño and La Niña events, as illustrated in Fig. 9, S3 and S4. In the CTP, considerable expansion can be found at Zhari NamCo, Tangra YumCo and Seling Co during the 2016/2017 and 2017/2018 La Niña events, corresponding well with excessive precipitation in these two years. On the NTP, dramatic expansions can also be found at Dogai Coring Lake and Lexiewudan Lake during the 2016/2017 and 2017/2018 La Niña events (Fig. S4). The expansion of Zhari NamCo was also remarkable due to the dramatic precipitation increase likely driven by La Niña. Despite some exceptions, we can see that drastic lake expansion in the TP is very consistent with historical La Niña incidents, which indicates that La Niña events may exert evident impact on the hydroclimate of the TP. In addition to ENSO, other climate variabilities (e.g., the North Atlantic Oscillation, Arctic Oscillation, and the Indian Ocean Dipole) may also promote the lake expansion in the TP (Liu and Juárez 2001; Wang et al. 2008). In contrast, considerable lake shrinkage (in 2011 and 2015) occurred in the TP during El Niño events (Lei et al. 2019). We here found a phenomenon that is different from the results of previous studies. In NTP, the lake level changes have drastically increased relative to 2015 (El Niño event) during the 2016/2017 and 2017/2018 La Niña events (Fig. S4), whereas the teleconnection between lake dynamics and La Niña appears weaker in NWTP. The three selected lakes (LumajangdongCo, Jieze Caka and Heishibei Lake) in NWTP expanded steadily even in 2015, but lake expansion was more dramatic in 2016 and 2017 (Fig. 5 and Fig. S1). This continuous lake expansion is dominated by lake dynamics in NWTP as reported in previous study (Jiang et al. 2017; Kleinherenbrink et al. 2015; Lei et al. 2017). Since glaciers are widely distributed in NWTP, the contribution of glacier melt to lake level change may be greater than the impact of the La Niña event. As indicated above, water level changes of different lakes showed different spatial and temporal patterns due to the obvious spatial heterogeneity of climate change. This anomaly rainfall change is closely associated with El Niño/La Niña event or other atmospheric circulation events.