Numerical Modelling of Pollutant Propagation in Lake Baikal during the Spring Thermal Bar

Abstract

Abstract In this paper, the phenomenon of the thermal bar in Lake Baikal and the propagation of pollutants from the Selenga River are studied with a nonhydrostatic mathematical model. An unsteady flow is simulated by solving numerically a system of thermal convection equations in the Boussinesq approximation using second-order implicit difference schemes in both space and time. To calculate the velocity and pressure fields in the model, an original procedure for buoyant flows, SIMPLED, which is a modification of the well-known Patankar and Spalding's SIMPLE algorithm, has been developed. The simulation results have shown that the thermal bar plays a key role in propagation of pollution in the area of Selenga River inflow into Lake Baikal.