Addendum to: Nature https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-021-03262-3 Published online 3 March 2021

Our analysis of lake level and storage variability observed by ICESat-2 uses a modified version of the Global Surface Water Occurrence (GSWO) product to identify lakes (Pekel et al., https://doi.org/10.1038/nature20584 (2016)). When we originally calculated the area of lakes derived from this product, we assumed a grid cell resolution of 30 m, the native resolution of the Landsat imagery used to develop the GSWO product. However, the GSWO product is actually post-processed to a grid cell resolution of 0.00025° × 0.00025°. Since the Earth is an oblate spheroid, the length (in meters) of both a degree of latitude and a degree of longitude vary with latitude. The height (y-axis) of each 0.00025° grid cell is approximately 28 m and increases very slightly with latitude (+0.3 m between 0° N and 75° N). The width (x-axis) of a 0.00025° grid cell is more strongly latitude-dependent and decreases towards the poles. For example, the width of a GSWO grid cell is approximately 28 m at the equator, 20 m at 45° N and 10 m at 70° N. As a result, we inadvertently overestimated lake area especially at high latitudes.We therefore recomputed lake areas based on this 0.00025° × 0.00025° resolution and adjusted the results in the article accordingly. We thank Nan Xu (Hohai University), Hui Lu (Tsinghua University), Wenyu Li (University of Toronto) and Peng Gong (University of Hong Kong) for alerting us to this error.

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