Abstract
Various manmade features (diversions, dredging, regulation, etc.) have affected water levels in the Great Lakes and their outlets since the 19th century. The goal of this study is to analyze the impacts of such features on the stationarity and dependence between monthly mean maximum and minimum water levels in the Great Lakes and St. Lawrence River from 1919 to 2012. As far as stationarity is concerned, the Lombard method brought out shifts in mean and variance values of monthly mean water levels in Lake Ontario and the St. Lawrence River related to regulation of these waterbodies in the wake of the digging of the St. Lawrence Seaway in the mid-1950s. Water level shifts in the other lakes are linked to climate variability. As for the dependence between water levels, the copula method revealed a change in dependence mainly between Lakes Erie and Ontario following regulation of monthly mean maximum and minimum water levels in the latter. The impacts of manmade features primarily affected the temporal variability of monthly mean water levels in Lake Ontario.
Highlights
The main characteristic of the Great Lakes is their interconnected nature (Figure 1), which has allowed the construction of numerous water diversion and regulation works
As far as water transfers are concerned, the first transfer work was carried out in the 19th century between Lake Michigan and the Mississippi River watershed, with water from Lake Michigan being diverted to the Illinois River through a canal dug in 1848
No shift is observed for Lake Michigan-Huron and St
Summary
The main characteristic of the Great Lakes is their interconnected nature (Figure 1), which has allowed the construction of numerous water diversion and regulation works. As far as water transfers are concerned, the first transfer work was carried out in the 19th century between Lake Michigan and the Mississippi River watershed, with water from Lake Michigan being diverted to the Illinois River through a canal dug in 1848. Flow in this canal has changed over time, but since 1930, it has been fixed by United States Supreme Court decrees, the most recent of which, in 1967, established this discharge at about 90 m3 /s. Two other canals were built in the early 1940s to divert water from the Hudson Bay watershed to Lake Superior: the Long Lac (built in 1941) and
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