Modeling Lake Titicaca's water balance: the dominant roles of precipitation and evaporation

Lima-Quispe, Nilo; Ruelland, Denis; Rabatel, Antoine; Lavado-Casimiro, Waldo; Condom, Thomas

doi:https://doi.org/10.5194/hess-29-655-2025

Articles | Volume 29, issue 3

https://doi.org/10.5194/hess-29-655-2025

© Author(s) 2025. This work is distributed under
the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License.

https://doi.org/10.5194/hess-29-655-2025

© Author(s) 2025. This work is distributed under
the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License.

Articles | Volume 29, issue 3

Research article

|

04 Feb 2025

Research article |

| 04 Feb 2025

Modeling Lake Titicaca's water balance: the dominant roles of precipitation and evaporation

Nilo Lima-Quispe, Denis Ruelland, Antoine Rabatel, Waldo Lavado-Casimiro, and Thomas Condom

Data sets

ERA5-Land hourly data from 1950 to present J. Muñoz-Sabater https://doi.org/10.24381/cds.e2161bac

Zongo glacier Service d'Observation GLACIOCLIM https://glacioclim.osug.fr/Glacier-du-Zongo-127

Accelerated global glacier mass loss in the early twenty-first century - Dataset R. Hugonnet et al. https://doi.org/10.6096/13

Lake Surface Water Temperature ARC-Lake v3 (1995-2012) C. Merchant and S. MacCallum https://doi.org/10.17864/1947.186

Short summary

This study estimated the water balance of Lake Titicaca using an integrated modeling framework that considers natural hydrological processes and net irrigation consumption. The proposed approach was implemented at a daily scale for a period of 35 years. This framework is able to simulate lake water levels with good accuracy over a wide range of hydroclimatic conditions. The findings demonstrate that a simple representation of hydrological processes is suitable for use in poorly gauged regions.