The Tibetan Plateau (TP), the highest and largest plateau in the world, with complex and competing cryospheric‐hydrologic‐geodynamic processes, is particularly sensitive to anthropogenic warming. The quantitative water mass budget in the TP is poorly known. Here we examine annual changes in lake area, level, and volume during 1970s–2015. We find that a complex pattern of lake volume changes during 1970s–2015: a slight decrease of −2.78 Gt yr⁻¹ during 1970s–1995, followed by a rapid increase of 12.53 Gt yr⁻¹ during 1996–2010, and then a recent deceleration (1.46 Gt yr⁻¹) during 2011–2015. We then estimated the recent water mass budget for the Inner TP, 2003–2009, including changes in terrestrial water storage, lake volume, glacier mass, snow water equivalent (SWE), soil moisture, and permafrost. The dominant components of water mass budget, namely, changes in lake volume (7.72 ± 0.63 Gt yr⁻¹) and groundwater storage (5.01 ± 1.59 Gt yr⁻¹), increased at similar rates. We find that increased net precipitation contributes the majority of water supply (74%) for the lake volume increase, followed by glacier mass loss (13%), and ground ice melt due to permafrost degradation (12%). Other term such as SWE (1%) makes a relatively small contribution. These results suggest that the hydrologic cycle in the TP has intensified remarkably during recent decades.

The mass balance in the Inner Tibet Plateau (ITP) derived from the Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment (GRACE) showed a positive rate that was attributed to the glacier mass gain, whereas glaciers in the region, from other field‐based studies, showed an overall mass loss. In this study, we examine lake's water level and mass changes in the Tibetan Plateau (TP) and suggest that the increased mass measured by GRACE was predominately due to the increased water mass in lakes. For the 200 lakes in the TP with 4 to 7 years of ICESat data available, the mean lake level and total mass change rates were +0.14 m/yr and +4.95 Gt/yr, respectively. Compared those in the TP, 118 lakes in the ITP showed higher change rates (+0.20 m/yr and +4.28 Gt/yr), accounting for 59% area and 86% mass increase of the 200 lakes. The lake's mass increase rate in the ITP explains the 61% increased mass (~7 Gt/yr) derived from GRACE [Jacob et al., 2012], while it only accounts for 53% of the total lake area in the ITP.