Thank you for visiting nature. You are using a browser version with limited support for CSS. To obtain the best experience, we recommend you use a more up to date browser or turn off compatibility mode in Internet Explorer. In the meantime, to ensure continued support, we are displaying the site without styles and JavaScript. The interaction between large inland water bodies and the atmosphere impacts the evolution of regional weather and climate, which in turn affects the lake dynamics, thermodynamics, ice-formation, and, therefore, ecosystems.
Over the last decades, various approaches have been used to model lake thermodynamics and dynamics in standalone mode or coupled to numerical atmospheric models. While it struggles to reproduce some short-term features, the multi-column model reasonably reproduces the seasonal mean of the thermal horizontal and vertical structures governing heat and mass exchanges between the lake surface and the lower atmosphere stratified period, thermocline depth, stability of the water column.
As it requires typically two orders of magnitude less computational ressources, it may allow a two-way coupling with a RCM on timescales or spatial resolutions where full 3D lake models are too demanding. Lakes influence the climate from the local to the synoptic scales. Their effects increase with their surface area, depth, and the magnitude of seasonal changes. They induce a thermal lag, affect heat and moisture budgets as well as wind speed and direction due to their low roughness height compared to surrounding land areas 1.
Representing lakes in high-resolution numerical weather forecasting models 2 and in regional climate models RCMs 3 received much attention because it is of paramount importance to resolving fine-scale atmospheric processes in order to to reproduce weather and climate adequately. Efforts started few decades ago, when the atmospheric model surface grid spacing became fine enough to accommodate large freshwater bodies e.
However, lake-atmosphere coupling is still a challenge due to the complexity of interactions and feedbacks associated to local surface-atmosphere processes e. Furthermore, the computing requirements of present 3D lake models are too intensive to realistically allow coupling them with climate models for durations above the year-range, especially in large lakes and at high spatial resolution Indeed, to date, long-term simulations of lakes properties at global or regional scales could mostly be performed with 1D models, e.
