The effect of wind on transport and circulation in Lake St. Clair

Abstract

A numerical circulation and transport model is used to simulate currents and trajectories in Lake St. Clair. Results from the model are compared to three different types of measurements, namely, (1) mean currents from an array of fixed current meters, (2) currents measured from a ship during seven synoptic surveys of the lake, and (3) trajectories of satellite‐tracked drifting buoys during four different experiments. The model is then used to predict the effects of storms on the residence time of water entering the lake from eight tributaries and the probable horizontal distribution in the lake of water from a particular tributary. Results show that although the average residence time of the lake is about 9 days, actual residence times range from less than 2 days to over 30 days depending on wind conditions. The calculated distribution patterns of water from various tributaries coincide closely with observed distributions of some water quality parameters and biota.

Transport of municipal wastewater, industrial and tributary discharges in eastern Lake Ontario and upper St. Lawrence River during the ice-free period of 2006

“…The movement of the modeled drifters was mostly driven by surface circulation and not directly by wind, contrary to results in Lake St. Clair (Schwab et al, 1989). Tracer concentrations at the intakes result primarily from wind forcing (wind-driven currents) in the Kingston Harbour, Kingston Basin, and North Channel; similar to contaminant dispersion from the Red River plume in Lake Winnipeg .…”

“…(2)) did not improve the error estimates significantly, as was observed by Schwab et al (1989) except for D1, D4 and D9 where it was a slightly better predictor of observed drifter velocities. This difference could be due to the inclusion of drifter properties (drag, inertia, mass) in ELCOM (Furnans et al, 2008), which was not the case for results seen in Lake St. Clair (Schwab et al, 1989) and also that D1, D4, D9 were released away from the shore and islands (Fig. 5).…”

“…To compare the movement of the drifters with the corresponding model results, the drifter tracks were used to calculate the observed drifter U (east-west component) and V (north-south component)- Table 2. velocities in the x (UTM easting)-and-y (UTM northing) directions (Table 1). The observed versus modeled drifter velocities were evaluated based on a statistical comparison of variances following Schwab et al (1989):…”

Relationships between wind-driven and hydraulic flow in Lake St. Clair and the St. Clair River Delta

“…The first scenario in this study consists of simulating the hydrodynamics for Lake St. Clair for the period June 1 to November 1, 1985, as carried out in Schwab et al (1989). This hindcast allows for both a comparison of modeled currents in Lake St. Clair with field measurements taken during this period, as well as comparison with a previously run two-dimensional numerical model for the same period (Schwab et al, 1989).…”

“…In particular, Schwab et al (1981Schwab et al ( , 1989) used a structured grid, twodimensional rigid lid model to simulate time-variable currents and trajectories using meteorological forcing conditions from 1985 and made comparisons to current meter and survey observations. In addition, other two-dimensional models simulated wave-current interaction on Lake St. Clair, in which field measurements were employed for model validation (Tsanis and Wu, 1990;Brissette et al, 1993).…”