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Model simulated lake-wide mean LST with different turbulent Prandtl number parameterization for the sensitivity test.
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The Laurentian Great Lakes are one of the most prominent hotspots for the study of climate change induced lake warming. Warming trends in large, deep lakes, which are often inferred by the observations of lake surface temperature (LST) in most studies, are strongly linked to the total lake heat content. In this study, we use a 3D hydrodynamic model...
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... in case C1-1, but the Pr t is set to 3, 5, 7, 10, indicating a smaller thermal eddy diffusivity compared to momentum eddy viscosity. This case is restarted from 12/07/2013 using C1-1's restart file to make the two cases comparable for the simulation period of December 2013-June 2014. As the conclusion drawn from the set of experiments are similar (Fig. 3), we use the case with Pr t = 5 as a representative case for further analysis thereafter as most studies provide estimates of Pr t in a range of 1-8. c. In case C2-1, the model configuration is the same as in case C1-1, but ice albedo is prescribed to 0.7 as a constant value, which represents the albedo of bare ice ( Zhong et al. 2016). ...
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The emerging shift in Great Lakes management from offshore to nearshore waters will require attention to complexities of coastal hydrodynamics and biogeochemical transformations. Emphasizing hydrodynamics, this work resolves transport processes in quantifying discharge plume and pollutant of concern (POC) footprint dimensions, the latter being the...
Citations
... In deep, oligomictic lakes, the total heat content generally increases during milder winters due to climate change (e.g., Ambrosetti & Barbanti, 1999;Michalski & Lemmin, 1995;Ye et al., 2019). Given that both vertical topdown convective cooling and lateral advection of cold waters impact a lake's heat content, it is essential to determine whether and under what conditions differential cooling processes can compensate for, or perhaps aggravate, climate change effects. ...
... Such information is crucial, particularly in deep lakes, where the lake's ecological state depends on its heat content (e.g., Ambrosetti & Barbanti, 1999;Weinberger & Vetter, 2014). Ye et al. (2019) demonstrated that the lake heat content, which is proportional to the depth-integrated water temperature, is a more appropriate indicator of climate-induced warming than surface temperatures. ...
Wintertime deepwater renewal, which is important for heat–oxygen–nutrient exchange in lakes, is traditionally considered to be mainly driven by 1D vertical convective cooling. However, differential cooling between shallow and deep waters can produce density currents that flow into deep layers. In order to determine the role that these two cooling processes play in deepwater renewal, field measurements and 3D numerical modeling were combined to investigate heat content dynamics in Lake Geneva's large basin, the Grand Lac (maximum depth 309 m), during an exceptionally cold air spell in early 2012 where complete overturning had been reported. In a novel approach, the heat budget of the lake was decomposed, which allowed the identification and quantification of the heat budget components. The heat budget decomposition revealed that vertical convective cooling only penetrated to 200 m and that lateral advection was not only caused by density currents being discharged from the shallow littoral zone of the Grand Lac, but also from the Lake's shallow Petit Lac basin (maximum depth 75 m); the latter was found to be the main driver of heat content decrease in the deep layers of the Grand Lac below ∼200‐m depth. These findings provide unique insight into heat exchange processes that cannot be obtained from field data or numerical simulations alone. Heat budget decomposition proved to be a powerful, universally applicable tool for quantifying the contribution of alternative deepwater renewal processes. This is important, since deepwater renewal by convective cooling is weakening due to persistent global warming.
... In fact, due to their large open-water areas and typically strong air-water vapour pressure gradients, lakes can lose a large proportion of their water via evaporation (Lenters et al., 2005;Zhao et al., 2022). Lake evaporation also plays a fundamental role in the energy budget of lakes, and is central to the modification of lake temperature and related processes such as stratification and mixing MacIntyre et al., 2009;Mishra et al., 2011;Spence et al., 2013;Ye et al., 2019). In turn, lake evaporation is crucial for the basic functioning of lakes and is often considered as one of the most important processes influencing their physical environment (Friedrich et al., 2018;Lenters et al., 2005;Woolway et al., 2020). ...
... The spatial distribution and time series analysis of LST from 1984 to 2021 (38 years) were conducted for 535 lakes. Lake surface warming or cooling is influenced by several factors, including solar radiation, ice cover duration, the timing of winter lake inverse stratification, spring stratification onset, and air temperature (Mason et al., 2016;Van Cleave et al., 2014;Ye et al., 2019). These processes occur over cold, warm, and transitional periods between the two seasons. ...
... The deeper layers of stratified lakes act as a thermal buffer, providing insulation against the cold winter conditions. According to the authors of [52], this buffering effect contributes to more stable surface water temperatures during winter, as the larger water volume minimizes the impact of external temperature changes. ...
Lakes are vital components of the Earth's hydrological cycle and are susceptible to the impacts of climate change. Understanding the changes in terms of minimum and maximum lake surface temperatures is crucial for assessing the effects of climate change on freshwater ecosystems. This study focuses on ten lakes in Poland to investigate the impacts of climate change on lake temperatures in different geographical regions. The Mann-Kendall (MK) and Sen tests were employed to analyze trends and changes in minimum and maximum water temperatures, respectively. The results reveal significant increases in the minimum and maximum temperatures, particularly in May and June. Different lakes exhibit varying trends and variability in temperature changes over time, indicating the vulnerability of these ecosystems. The current study also examines the magnitude of annual temperature changes and classifies them into different levels. This analysis highlights the complex relationship between air temperature, seasonal cycles, and lake morphometric characteristics in shaping variations in lake surface water temperature. These findings contribute to understanding the impacts of climate change on Poland's lakes and provide valuable insights for developing conservation strategies and adaptive measures to protect freshwater resources.
... Notably, although OWFC seems to have a smaller warm bias in simulating July LST than WF2C does, 10.1029/2023MS003620 22 of 24 OWFC actually overestimates the outgoing latent and sensible heat fluxes when compared to observation. Furthermore, WF2C has a larger warm bias of July LST and overlake air temperature than OWFC despite having a better reproduction of latent and sensible heat fluxes than OWFC, as discussed in Section 4. The overestimation of LST can be caused by a combination of various factors including the atmospheric (Wang et al., 2022) and hydrodynamic processes (Ye et al., 2019) simulated in each model as well as the lake-atmosphere coupling. ...
The Laurentian Great Lakes are the world's largest freshwater system and regulate the climate of the Great Lakes region, which has been increasingly experiencing climatic, hydrological, and ecological changes. An accurate mechanistic representation of the Great Lakes thermal structure in Regional Climate Models (RCMs) is paramount to studying the climate of this region. Currently, RCMs have primarily represented the Great Lakes through coupled one‐dimensional (1D) column lake models; this approach works well for small inland lakes but is unable to resolve the realistic hydrodynamics of the Great Lakes and leads to inaccurate representations of lake surface temperature (LST) that influence regional climate and weather patterns. This work overcomes this limitation by developing a fully two‐way coupled modeling system using the Weather Research and Forecasting model and a three‐dimensional (3D) hydrodynamic model. The coupled model system resolves the interactive physical processes between the atmosphere, lake, and surrounding watersheds; and validated against a range of observational data. The model is then used to investigate the potential impacts of lake‐atmosphere coupling on the simulated summer LST of Lake Superior. By evaluating the difference between our two‐way coupled modeling system and our observation‐driven modeling system, we find that coupled‐lake atmosphere dynamics can lead to a higher LST during June‐September through higher net surface heat flux entering the lake in June and July and a lower net surface heat flux entering the lake in August and September. The unstratified water in June distributes the entering surface heat flux throughout the water column leading to a minor LST increase, while the stratified waters of July create a conducive thermal structure for the water surface to warm rapidly under the higher incoming surface heat flux. This research provides insight into the coupled modeling system behavior, which is critical for enhancing our predictive understanding of the Great Lakes climate system.
... The default lake scheme in WRF, WRF-Lake, is a one-dimensional (1-D) eddy diffusion lake model based on concepts from Henderson-Sellers et al. (1983), Henderson-Sellers (1985), and Hostetler et al. (1993) and adapted from the lake component within the Community Land Model (Oleson et al. 2004(Oleson et al. , 2010Subin et al. 2012;Gu et al. 2015). While complex 3-D lake models have been developed in recent decades for the purpose of investigating lake dynamics (e.g., Ye et al. 2019) and lake-atmosphere interactions (Xue et al. 2017), these models require more computational resources due to the complex hydrodynamics and enhanced spatial resolutions (Wu et al. 2020). ...
Increasing evaporative demand from storage reservoirs is aggravating water scarcity issues across the American West. In the Rio Grande basin, open water evaporation estimates represent approximately one-fifth of all water losses from the basin. However, most estimates of reservoir evaporation rely on outdated methods, point measurements, or simplistic models. Warming temperatures and increasing atmospheric evaporative demand are stressing overallocated resources, increasing the need for improved evaporation estimates. In response to this need, we develop open water evaporation estimates at Elephant Butte Reservoir (EBR), New Mexico, using three evaporation models and field measurements. Few studies quantify spatial heterogeneity in evaporation rates across large reservoirs; we therefore focus our efforts on using the Weather Research and Forecasting Model coupled to an energy budget lake model, WRF-Lake, to simulate evaporation across EBR over the course of two years. We compare results from WRF-Lake, which simulates lake heat storage, to results from the Complementary Relationship Lake Evaporation (CRLE) model and the Global Lake Evaporation Volume dataset (GLEV). Results indicate that monthly and annual evaporation totals from WRF-Lake and GLEV are similar, while CRLE overestimates annual evaporation totals, with monthly peak evaporation offset compared to WRF-Lake and GLEV. While WRF-Lake and GLEV appear to capture monthly and annual evaporation totals, only WRF-Lake simulates differences in evaporation totals across the reservoir surface. Average annual evaporation at EBR was approximately 1487 mm, yet annual totals differed by up to 545 mm depending on location. This study improves understanding of open water evaporation and elucidates limitations of extrapolating point in situ or bulk evaporation estimates across large reservoirs.
Significance Statement
Changes in climate are amplifying the loss of stored water in reservoirs due to increases in evaporation. Water managers need to account for this water loss, but many current methods do not accurately reflect the temporal and spatial variability in evaporation across large, heterogeneous reservoirs. To address this gap, we use a numerical weather prediction model coupled to a lake model to simulate spatial heterogeneity in reservoir evaporation on a subdaily time step. Our results suggest that bulk evaporation models may be sufficient for estimating evaporation at smaller, more homogeneous reservoirs, but more complex formulations may be more appropriate for estimating evaporation rates at large, complex reservoirs and for better understanding the heat storage affects that influence temporal variability of evaporation.
... Evaporation directly and, in some cases, substantially modifies the hydrologic, chemical, and energy budgets, making it one of the most important physical controls on lake ecosystems (Schindler, 2001;Lenters et al., 2005;Riveros-Iregui et al., 2017;Woolway et al., 2020). Not only does lake evaporation play a fundamental role in these budgets through the physical removal of fresh water, but the cooling effect of latent heat flux is also central to the modification of lake temperature, and related processes such as stratification (Mishra et al., 2011;Lenters et al., 2013;Spence et al., 2013;Van Cleave et al., 2014) and vertical mixing (MacIntyre et al., 2009;Ye et al., 2019), with likely impacts on lake chemistry and biota (Likens et al., 2009;Williamson et al., 2009;Wahed et al., 2014). Importantly, lake evaporation also contributes to critical feedbacks within lakes, including interactions between evaporation and lake surface temperature Spence et al., 2013;Van Cleave et al., 2014;Ye et al., 2019;Kishcha et al., 2021), feedbacks between salinity and evaporation rates (Shilo et al., 2015;Riveros-Iregui et al., 2017), and the coupling of evaporation with changes in lake level and extent (Marsh and Bigras, 1988;Li et al., 2013;Friedrich et al., 2018;Zhan et al., 2019). ...
... Not only does lake evaporation play a fundamental role in these budgets through the physical removal of fresh water, but the cooling effect of latent heat flux is also central to the modification of lake temperature, and related processes such as stratification (Mishra et al., 2011;Lenters et al., 2013;Spence et al., 2013;Van Cleave et al., 2014) and vertical mixing (MacIntyre et al., 2009;Ye et al., 2019), with likely impacts on lake chemistry and biota (Likens et al., 2009;Williamson et al., 2009;Wahed et al., 2014). Importantly, lake evaporation also contributes to critical feedbacks within lakes, including interactions between evaporation and lake surface temperature Spence et al., 2013;Van Cleave et al., 2014;Ye et al., 2019;Kishcha et al., 2021), feedbacks between salinity and evaporation rates (Shilo et al., 2015;Riveros-Iregui et al., 2017), and the coupling of evaporation with changes in lake level and extent (Marsh and Bigras, 1988;Li et al., 2013;Friedrich et al., 2018;Zhan et al., 2019). While evaporation substantially influences various processes within the lake, fluctuations in water level represent, arguably, one of the most important ones for the ecosystem services that lakes provide. ...
Lake evaporation plays an important role in the water budget of lakes. Predicting lake evaporation responses to climate change is thus of paramount importance for the planning of mitigation and adaption strategies. However, most studies that have simulated climate change impacts on lake evaporation have typically utilised a single mechanistic model. Whilst such studies have merit, projected changes in lake evaporation from any single lake model can be considered uncertain. To better understand evaporation responses to climate change, a multi-model approach (i.e., where a range of projections are considered), is desirable. In this study, we present such multi-model analysis, where five lake models forced by four different climate model projections are used to simulate historic and future change (1901-2099) in lake evaporation. Our investigation, which focuses on sub-tropical Lake Kinneret (Israel), suggested considerable differences in simulated evaporation rates among the models, with the annual average evaporation rates varying between 1232 mm year⁻¹ and 2608 mm year⁻¹ during the historic period (1901-2005). We explored these differences by comparing the models with reference evaporation rates estimated using in-situ data (2000-2005) and a bulk aerodynamic algorithm. We found that the model ensemble generally captured the intra-annual variability in reference evaporation rates, and compared well at seasonal timescales (RMSEc = 0.19, R=0.92). Using the model ensemble, we then projected future change in evaporation rates under three different Representative Concentration Pathway (RCP) scenarios: RCP 2.6, 6.0 and 8.5. Our projections indicated that, by the end of the 21st century (2070-2099), annual average evaporation rates would increase in Lake Kinneret by 9-22% under RCPs 2.6-8.5. When compared with projected regional declines in precipitation, our projections suggested that the water balance of Lake Kinneret could experience a deficit of 14-40% this century. We anticipate this substantial projected deficit combined with a considerable growth in population expected for this region could have considerable negative impacts on water availability and would consequently increase regional water stress.
... In turn, the intra-lake heterogeneity of ice and surface water temperature responses to climate change 65,69 were not considered in this study. This can be particularly important for large lakes where the time taken for deeper central regions to warm during spring and summer, and to cool in autumn and winter, is substantially different from the shallow nearshore regions [70][71][72] . ...
How lake temperatures across large geographic regions are responding to widespread alterations in ice phenology (i.e., the timing of seasonal ice formation and loss) remains unclear. Here, we analyse satellite data and global-scale simulations to investigate the contribution of long-term variations in the seasonality of lake ice to surface water temperature trends across the Northern Hemisphere. Our analysis suggests a widespread excess lake surface warming during the months of ice-off which is, on average, 1.4 times that calculated during the open-water season. This excess warming is influenced predominantly by an 8-day advancement in the average timing of ice break-up from 1979 to 2020. Until the permanent loss of lake ice in the future, excess lake warming may be further amplified due to projected future alterations in lake ice phenology. Excess lake warming will likely alter within-lake physical and biogeochemical processes with numerous implications for lake ecosystems.
... Earth's rapidly changing climate has forced significant changes in environmental conditions in lakes globally [112]. Particularly pronounced effects of lake warming have occurred in Lake Superior, including increases in air-lake energy exchange, decreases in winter ice coverage [113,114], and the recent highly unusual occurrences of noxious cyanobacteria blooms in otherwise oligotrophic nearshore plankton assemblages during the warmest summers [115]. Many more life history studies like the one presented here for H. alternans are required to begin to understand the biological responses of native organisms of Lake Superior to these rapid, systemwide changes in this globally important freshwater resource. ...
We studied the life history, diet, and trophic ecology of Hydropsyche alternans in four rocky sites located along the south-central coast of Lake Superior. The H. alternans life history and broad trophic niche space were similar to those of its riverine relatives. Quantitative sampling over the course of one ice-free season revealed that most individuals lived univoltine life histories that featured early to mid-summer mating, and oviposition and rapid growth and development through summer into fall. Most individuals overwintered as ultimate or penultimate larval instars. Pupation followed ice-out in the spring. Gut content sampling and δ13C and δ15N stable isotope analyses indicated that the typical larval diet is a mix of benthic, pelagic, and terrestrial food resources, including diatoms, small arthropods, sloughed periphyton, and in one site, fugal hyphae apparently of foredune origin. As a suspension-feeding omnivore that relies on waves and currents to deliver food to its nets, H. alternans larvae form energetic links between coastal, nearshore, and offshore food webs. These connections have been lost throughout the lower Laurentian Great Lakes as a consequence of the invasion and spread of Dreissena mussels.
... Furthermore, in the Great Lakes, landfast ice in the major waterways and ports poses a challenge for navigation and icebreaking operations that assist commercial shipping. Several numerical model applications to predict Great Lakes ice cover have been presented [22][23][24][25][26][27][28][29][30], including the model used for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA)'s Great Lakes Operational Forecast System (GLOFS) [29,31]. However, these applications did not include a specific parameterization to represent or evaluate the models' abilities to simulate landfast ice. ...
Landfast ice plays an important role in the nearshore hydrodynamics of large lakes, such as the dampening of surface waves and currents. In this study, previously developed landfast ice basal stress parameterizations were added to an unstructured grid hydrodynamic ice model to represent the effects of grounded ice keels and tensile strength of ice cover. Numerical experiments using this model were conducted to evaluate the development of coastal landfast ice in Lake Superior. A sensitivity study of the free parameters was conducted from December 2018 to May 2021 to cover both high and low ice cover winters in Lake Superior and was compared against observations from the United States National Ice Center. The model reproduces the annual variation in coastal landfast ice in Lake Superior, particularly in shallow nearshore areas and the semi-enclosed bays in the northern regions of the lake. Experiments also show that the growth of landfast ice is mainly controlled by the free parameter that controls the critical ice thickness for the activation of basal stress. Overall, the model tends to underestimate the extent of coastal landfast against observations.
