AQUASTAT - Evaporation from artificial lakes and reservoirs
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Dams and their associated reservoirs provide many services, including water storage, flow regulation, navigation, hydropower, in - stream and off - stream uses, flood protection, amongst others. However, these artificial lakes and reservoirs evaporate more water than the natural surface water flow before the dam was built, because dams generally increase the surface area of the body of water. This means that more water is exposed to air and direct sunlight, thus increasing ev aporation. This “lost” water is referred to as consumed, because it is removed from the system. In some cases, this water consumption can be quite substantial. AQUASTAT gathers country - level inform ation about dams and reservoirs (see Section 2), but information about evaporation from artificial lakes and reservoirs is rarely reported. Due to its importance, AQUASTAT has estimated the evaporation for all artificial lakes and reservoirs that are avai l able in the geo - referenced dam database it maintains. This exercise is a very rough estimation, the limitations of which are documented in Section 3 and Section 5, and it thus should be considered a s an 'order of magnitude' study.