Simulating 2368 temperate lakes reveals weak coherence in stratification phenology

Abstract

a b s t r a c tChanges in water temperatures resulting from climate warming can alter the structure and function of aquatic ecosystems. Lake-specific physical characteristics may play a role in mediating individual lake responses to climate. Past mechanistic studies of lake-climate interactions have simulated generic lake classes at large spatial scales or performed detailed analyses of small numbers of real lakes. Understanding the diversity of lake responses to climate change across landscapes requires a hybrid approach that couples site-specific lake characteristics with broad-scale environmental drivers. This study provides a substantial advancement in lake ecosystem modeling by combining open-source tools with freely available continental-scale data to mechanistically model daily temperatures for 2368 Wisconsin lakes over three decades . The model accurately predicted observed surface layer temperatures (RMSE: 1.74 • C) and the presence/absence of stratification (81.1% agreement). Among-lake coherence was strong for surface temperatures and weak for the timing of stratification, suggesting individual lake characteristics mediate some -but not all -ecologically relevant lake responses to climate.Published by Elsevier B.V. This is an open access article under the CC BY license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/).

LakeSST: Lake Skin Surface Temperature in French inland water bodies for 1999–2016 from Landsat archives

“…Onedimensional hydrodynamic models used by the limnological community do not offer a solution either, since their RMSE is typically ∼ 1-2 • C (e.g. Read et al, 2014), of the same order of magnitude as the RMSE of the satellite temperature estimations (see below). However, whatever the algorithm the determination of site-and time-specific corrections would still require the use of in situ (i.e.…”

“…We analysed the data using Python 2.7 and R 3.2.0 (R Core Team, 2015). We used the Python packages NumPy (van der Walt et al, 2011), Matplotlib (Hunter, 2007 and Pandas (McKinney, 2010) and the R packages MASS (Venables and Ripley, 2002) and rLakeAnalyzer (Winslow et al, 2016).…”

A General Lake Model (GLM 2.4) for linking with high-frequency sensor data from the Global Lake Ecological Observatory Network (GLEON)

“…Here, GLM is presented as a tool that meets many of the needs of network participants for their individual lake simulation requirements, in addition to being suitable for application in a 5 distributed way across tens to thousands of lakes for regional and global scale assessments. Recent examples include an application of the model for assessing how the diversity of >2000 lakes in lake-rich landscape in Wisconsin respond to meteorological conditions and projected warming (Read et al, 2014), and given its computationally efficient nature it is envisioned to be made available as a library for use within in land-surface models (e.g., the Community Land Model, CLM), allowing improved representation of lake dynamics in regional hydrological or climate assessments. With further advances 10 in the degree of resolution and scope of earth system models, we further envisage GLM as an option suitable to be embedded within these models to better allow the simulation of lake stratification, air-water interaction of momentum and heat, and also biogeochemically relevant variables associated with contemporary questions about greenhouse gases emissions such as CO 2 , CH 4 , and N 2 O.…”

“…In doing so, GLEON has been a leading example of collaborative research within the hydrological and ecological science disciplines. GLEON aims 15 to bring together environmental sensor networks, numerical models, and information technology to explore ecosystem dynamics across a vast range of scales -from an individual lake or reservoir to regional (Read et al, 2014;Klug et al, 2012), and even global trends (Rigosi et al, 2015;O´Reilly et al, 2015). Ultimately, it is the aim of the network to facilitate primary discovery and synthesis to provide an improved scientific basis for sustainable freshwater resource management.…”

“…CC BY 4.0 License. application to numerous lakes within the GLEON network and beyond (e.g., Read et al, 2014;Bueche et al, 2017, Snortheim et al, 2017Weber et al, 2017;Menció et al, 2017;Bruce et al, 2017). GLM has been designed to be an opensource community model suited to modelling studies across a broad spectrum of lakes, reservoirs and wetlands.…”