Publication Date:
2014-06-15
Description:
A slab lake model was developed for the Great Salt Lake (GSL) and coupled to a regional climate model to enable better evaluation of regional effects of projected climate change. The GSL is hypersaline with an area of approximately 4400 km 2 , and its notable shallowness (the deeper sections average 6.5 to 9 m at current lake levels) renders it highly sensitive to climate change. A time-independent (constant) effective mixing depth of approximately 5 m was determined for the GSL by numerically optimizing model-observation agreement, and improvement gained using a time-dependent effective mixing depth assumption was smaller than the uncertainty in the satellite-based observations. The slab model with constant effective mixing depth accounted for more than 97% of the variance in satellite-based observations of GSL surface temperature for years 2001 through 2003. Using a lake surface temperature climatology in place of the lake model resulted in annual mean near-surface air temperature differences that were small (˜10 -2 K) away from the lake, but differences in annual precipitation downstream reached 3 cm (4.5%) mainly because of enhanced turbulent heat fluxes off the lake during spring. When subjected to a range of pseudo global warming scenarios, the annual mean lake surface temperature increased by 0.8°C per degree of air temperature increase.
Electronic ISSN:
1942-2466
Topics:
Geography
,
Geosciences
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