Abstract
While winter storms are generally common in western Europe, the rarer summer storms may result in more pronounced impacts on lake physics. Using long-term, high frequency datasets of weather and lake thermal structure from the west of Ireland (2005 to 2017), we quantified the effects of storms on the physical conditions in a monomictic, deep lake close to the Atlantic Ocean. We analysed a total of 227 storms during the stratified (May to September, n = 51) and non-stratified (November to March, n = 176) periods. In winter, as might be expected, changes were distributed over the entire water column, whereas in summer, when the lake was stratified, storms only impacted the smaller volume above the thermocline. During an average summer (May–September) storm, the lake number dropped by an order of magnitude, the thermocline deepened by an average of 2.8 m, water column stability decreased by an average of 60.4 j m−2 and the epilimnion temperature decreased by a factor of five compared to the average change in winter (0.5 °C vs. 0.1 °C). Projected increases in summer storm frequency will have important implications for lake physics and biological pathways.
Highlights
In our currently warming climate [1], storms are projected to become more common [2] and to increase in strength [3] in many regions, including the Atlantic seaboard of Europe [4]
Our study is the first to describe in detail what happened to the physical structure in a humic lake during multiple storms, especially those that occur during summer when the impacts on the lake physics were greatest
We found that the surface water temperature decreased 5 fold during summer storms compared to winter storms
Summary
In our currently warming climate [1], storms are projected to become more common [2] and to increase in strength [3] in many regions, including the Atlantic seaboard of Europe [4]. Wind speed is an important component in the transport of momentum, heat and atmospheric moisture [7]. Higher wind speeds increase turbulent mixing within lakes which lowers water column stability and deepens or removes thermoclines [8]. The exchange of heat between lakes and the atmosphere in turn affects a wide range of processes within lakes, including thermal structure, water column stability, thermocline depth [9], nutrient cycling [10], phytoplankton growth [11,12,13] and water turbidity [13,14]
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