Physically Plausible Methods for Projecting Changes in Great Lakes Water Levels under Climate Change Scenarios

Abstract

Abstract A method for projecting the water levels of the Laurentian Great Lakes under scenarios of human-caused climate change, used almost to the exclusion of other methods in the past, relies very heavily on the large basin runoff model (LBRM) as a component for determining the water budget for the lake system. This model uses near-surface air temperature as a primary predictor of evapotranspiration (ET); as in previous published work, it is shown here that the model’s very high sensitivity to temperature causes it to overestimate ET in a way that is greatly at variance with the fundamental principle of conservation of energy at the land surface. The traditional formulation is characterized here as being equivalent to having several suns in the virtual sky created by LBRM. More physically based methods show, relative to the traditional method, often astoundingly less potential ET and less ET, more runoff from the land and net basin supply for the lake basins, and higher lake water levels in the future. Using various methods of estimating the statistical significance, it is found that, at minimum, these discrepancies in results are significant at the 99.998% level. The lesson for the larger climate impact community is to use caution about whether an impact is forced directly by air temperature itself or is significantly forced by season or latitude independently of temperature. The results here apply only to the water levels of the Great Lakes and the hydrology of its basin and do not affect larger questions of climate change.