The Tibetan Plateau plays an important role in the global water cycle and is strongly influenced by climate change. While energy and matter fluxes have been more intensely studied over land surfaces, a large proportion of lakes have been either neglected or parameterised with simple bulk approaches. Therefore turbulent fluxes were measured over wet grassland and a shallow lake with a single eddy-covariance complex at the shoreline in the Nam Co basin in summer 2009. Footprint analysis was used to split observations according to the underlying surface, and two sophisticated surface models were utilised to derive gap-free time series. Results were then compared with observations and simulations from a nearby eddy-covariance station over dry grassland, yielding pronounced differences. Observations and footprint integrated simulations compared well, even for situations with flux contributions including grassland and lake. It is shown that the accessibility problem for EC measurements on lakes can be overcome by combining standard meteorological measurements at the shoreline with model simulations, only requiring representative estimates of lake surface temperature.