Daily lake water levels worldwide (Copernicus)
What it measures. Reports how high the surface of lakes and reservoirs sits, measured in metres above a standard reference level, for water bodies around the globe.
How it's made. Measured by space-based radar altimeters and delivered near real time as map data points by the EU's Copernicus Land Monitoring Service, with records reaching back to 1992.
How & where you'd use it. Lets people watch lakes and reservoirs rise and fall day to day, valuable for drought monitoring, flood awareness, and managing water supplies.
What's measured
Coverage & cadence
- Time span1992-09-26 → ongoing
- Spatial extent-154.9, -50.33, 170.17, 71.48
- FormatsGeoJSON
What you can do with it
- Follow rainfall, floods and surface-water extent
- Track soil moisture and the onset of drought
- Monitor lakes, rivers and groundwater storage
Official description
Defined as the height, in meters above the geoid, of the reflecting surface of continental water bodies. It is observed by space radar altimeters and data are available at global scale in near real time in vector format with the temporal extent from 1992 to present.
Get the data
# ESA Copernicus Data Space — open STAC API (free account)
from pystac_client import Client
cat = Client.open("https://stac.dataspace.copernicus.eu/v1")
search = cat.search(
collections=["clms_wl-lakes_global_vector_daily_v2"], # add _cog or _nc for a format variant
bbox=(-10, 35, 30, 60), # your area (W,S,E,N)
datetime="2024-01-01/2024-12-31",
)
items = list(search.items()) # then read assets with rioxarray / xarrayBrowsing the Copernicus STAC is open; downloading bytes needs a free Copernicus Data Space account.
Official links
- Open data source Copernicus STAC