What and How Much Information about Lakes in Panama Can a Web Application, Climates of Lake Basins Provide?

Lakes are very important for multi-sectors including water sector in Panama because of large demand of water use and of hydroelectric power generations. Panamanian know lakes in their own country but foreign researchers do not always so. For an example, Wikipedia contains only 6 dams with a hydroelectric power reservoir. It is interesting to know how much information about lakes in Panama we can obtain on the Internet. This study investigates what information and how much about lakes in Panama are accessible for preliminary scientific investigations through the Internet.

A web application, Climates of Global Lake Basins (CGLB) have been developed for providing lake information from the view point of hydrological and water resources by the combination of existing data sets. The distinction of CGLB from other web applications is that CGLB has a drawing functions of climatological information on demand. CGLB also provides landscape photographs provided by Global Confluence Project as well as quasi-real time monitoring of lake water levels using satellite altimetry provided by U.S. Department of Agriculture. The first version of CGLB contained about 600 lakes or more in the world. Recently, CGLB has been upgraded by changing a lake information database from the World Lake Database (WLDB; http://wldb.ilec.or.jp/) to the HydroLAKES following a new development of the source code due to introduction of a free database module to treat more than more than 1 million of lakes.

Lake database targeting the entire world contains some lakes only due to the coverage of the whole globe. For example, WLDB contains only 2 lakes in Panama: Bayano Lake, Chiriqui Lagoon, and Gatun Lake. These selections may be importance of the lake. On the other hand, CGLB based on HydroLAKES contains 73 lakes in Panama. As an example, we demonstrate what information and how much data of Gatun Lake are available from CGLB.