Mixed Thermal Conditions Research Articles

A Near‐Term Iterative Forecasting System Successfully Predicts Reservoir Hydrodynamics and Partitions Uncertainty in Real Time

AbstractFreshwater ecosystems are experiencing greater variability due to human activities, necessitating new tools to anticipate future water quality. In response, we developed and deployed a real‐time iterative water temperature forecasting system (FLARE—Forecasting Lake And Reservoir Ecosystems). FLARE is composed of water temperature and meteorology sensors that wirelessly stream data, a data assimilation algorithm that uses sensor observations to update predictions from a hydrodynamic model and calibrate model parameters, and an ensemble‐based forecasting algorithm to generate forecasts that include uncertainty. Importantly, FLARE quantifies the contribution of different sources of uncertainty (driver data, initial conditions, model process, and parameters) to each daily forecast of water temperature at multiple depths. We applied FLARE to Falling Creek Reservoir (Vinton, Virginia, USA), a drinking water supply, during a 475‐day period encompassing stratified and mixed thermal conditions. Aggregated across this period, root mean square error (RMSE) of daily forecasted water temperatures was 1.13°C at the reservoir's near‐surface (1.0 m) for 7‐day ahead forecasts and 1.62°C for 16‐day ahead forecasts. The RMSE of forecasted water temperatures at the near‐sediments (8.0 m) was 0.87°C for 7‐day forecasts and 1.20°C for 16‐day forecasts. FLARE successfully predicted the onset of fall turnover 4–14 days in advance in two sequential years. Uncertainty partitioning identified meteorology driver data as the dominant source of uncertainty in forecasts for most depths and thermal conditions, except for the near‐sediments in summer, when model process uncertainty dominated. Overall, FLARE provides an open‐source system for lake and reservoir water quality forecasting to improve real‐time management.

Mixed thermal conditions in convection: how do continents affect the mantle’s circulation?

Natural convection is omnipresent on Earth. A basic and well-studied model for it is Rayleigh–Bénard convection, the fluid flow in a layer heated from below and cooled from above. Most explorations of Rayleigh–Bénard convection focus on spatially uniform, perfectly conducting thermal boundary conditions, but many important geophysical phenomena are characterized by boundary conditions which are a mixture of conducting and adiabatic materials. For example, the differences in thermal conductivity between continental and oceanic lithospheres are believed to play an important role in plate tectonics. To study this, Wang et al. (J. Fluid Mech., vol. 817, 2017, R1), measure the effect of mixed adiabatic–conducting boundary conditions on turbulent Rayleigh–Bénard convection, finding experimental proof that even if the total heat transfer is primarily affected by the adiabatic fraction, the arrangement of adiabatic and conducting plates is crucial in determining the large-scale flow dynamics.

Natural convection heat transfer of non-Newtonian fluids in porous media from a vertical cone under mixed thermal boundary conditions

This work studies the problem of the steady natural convection boundary layer flow over a downward-pointing vertical cone in porous media saturated with non-Newtonian power-law fluids under mixed thermal boundary conditions. A similarity analysis is performed, and the obtained similar equations are solved by cubic spline collocation method. The effects of the power-law viscosity index and the similarity exponent on the heat transfer characteristics under mixed thermal boundary conditions have been studied. Under mixed thermal boundary conditions, both the surface heat flux and the surface temperature are found to decrease when the power-law viscosity index of the non-Newtonian power-law fluid in porous media is increased. Moreover, an increase in the similarity exponent tends to increase the boundary layer thickness and thus decreases the surface heat flux under mixed thermal conditions. The generalized governing equations derived in this work can be applied to the cases of prescribed surface temperature and prescribed heat flux.

Punch problem of transversely isotropic material for a half-space with mixed thermal conditions

In this paper stresses and displacement components have been calculated for a transversely isotropic frictionless half-space when the temperature field and the normal displacement component are prescribed within a circular region of radius ‘a’ while the remaining stressfree surface is radiating in accordance with Newton’s law. The solutions of both the thermal and the elastic problems are obtained in terms of the solution of a Fredholm integral equation of the second kind.