AGS-PRF: Observing and Diagnosing Mechanisms of Energy Balance in Temperate Freshwater Systems

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Freshwater lakes play a small but important role in the transfer of energy and carbon to the atmosphere. Current earth system models rely mainly on lake temperature to determine how active these systems are, but they do an inadequate job during wintertime ice and transition season conditions. The funding under this grant will provide an early career researcher the opportunity to study the complete picture of lake thermodynamics by making a suite of measurements from a platform in the middle of a mid-latitude lake. The main scientific benefit of this award will be improved modeling of lakes within the widely used Community Land Model. Local high school students and undergraduates will be actively solicited to participate with the project and the lead researcher will also work to develop high school teaching modules. Data from this project, such as ice thickness, will be disseminated at near real-time to stakeholders including the Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources, which will benefit the public and economy by increasing the safety of major wintertime activities like ice fishing.Freshwater energy, momentum, and biogeochemical cycles are coupled in ways unique to other terrestrial or ocean systems, but observations and theoretical improvements of all these processes has been limited. This research project will specifically focus on quantifying all parts of a lake energy budget with the goal of reaching a complete thermodynamic closure, in order to improve process-level understanding of changes in ice-cover and feedbacks to biogeochemistry. The researcher will use year round eddy covariance flux data currently deployed on a lake, in combination with novel lake thermal measurements, to understand time lake processes, particularly in winter. With new insight into the processes that control surface heat flux, this project will refine theories of lake energy cycling and improve prediction of lake carbon cycling, particularly during ice-transition periods.