| The Qaidam Basin is a concentrated distribution area of salt lakes and resource chemical industry base in China, and the rapid expansion of the lakes has obviously affected the utilization of water resources, protection of salt lake resources and ecological environment of the lake area. In this paper, we collect the meteorological data of the Qaidam Basin and the lake change data of previous studies, as well as the changes the area change data of 17 typical salt lakes in the inflow area of the Qaidam Basin, combined with the reported observation data on the temperature and precipitation increase rate and glacial mass balance of the Qinghai-Tibet Plateau, to explore the main influencing factors of the rapid expansion of lakes in the Qaidam Basin. The results show that the temperature and precipitation in the Qaidam Basin increased synchronously, but with different increases and different increasing rate, which were different influencing factors for lake expansion in different spatial regions. In detail, terminal lakes in the central-eastern basin, supplied by the hydrological supply of the eastern Kunlun Mountains and the Qilian Mountains, expanded significantly, which mainly affected by increase of water volume in the river catchment caused by the significant increasing precipitation; by contrast, the terminal lakes in the western basin expanded more slowly, which mainly affected by the increase in ice and snow meltwater replenishment along with significant increasing temperature. |
