Predicting Climate Change Impact on Physical Mass Transport in Lakes

尽管加拿大比大多数国家拥有更多的淡水，但由于气候变化和其他人类影响，我们可用水的数量和质量的变化极大地影响了加拿大人的生活。对循环和不可逆混合等输送过程的描述对于了解各种水质问题至关重要。例子包括将营养物质困在上游水库后面，向支持浮游植物和渔业食物供应的光区供应营养物质，污水扩散，以及污染物(如大肠杆菌、贾第虫和隐孢子虫)进入饮用水供应入口的路径。此外，鉴于气候变化对湖泊的影响，现代湖沼学面临着对冰盖下发生的过程的认识空白。由于严酷的冬季条件、变幻莫测的冰面和主要数量的低震级变化，对冰盖时期的环流和混合研究很少，这往往接近仪器分辨率的极限。最近新的观测方法的发展可以克服这些问题，并有助于深入了解冰盖湖泊的物理过程。 拟议的研究侧重于描述湖泊和水库内的运输过程，重点是气候变化的潜在影响。这项拟议的研究将无人、无缆、水下机器人的开发和应用与传统的现场数据收集技术相结合，以收集将用于描述无冰和结冰湖泊中的循环的数据，这些数据将用于开发和验证数值水动力学模型。拟议研究的最终结果将是对目标湖泊的物理动力学的了解，以及对这些湖泊进行彻底测试的水动力学数值模型。来自目标湖泊的结果将提高数值水动力模型的预报能力，可作为水质和生态数值模型的高质量输入。

Although Canada has more fresh water than most nations, changes in the quantity and quality of our available water due to climate change and other human influences greatly affect Canadian life. A description of transport processes such as circulation and irreversible mixing is essential for an understanding of a variety of water quality issues. Examples include trapping of nutrients behind upstream reservoirs, nutrient supply to the photic zone supporting phytoplankton and fisheries food supply, effluent dispersal, and the path of contaminants (such as E. coli, Giardia and Cryptosporidium) to drinking water supply intakes. Furthermore, in view of the problems related to climate change impact on lakes, modern limnology is confronted with the knowledge gap on processes that occur under ice-cover. Circulation and mixing during the ice-covered period has been poorly investigated due to harsh winter conditions, treacherous ice surface, and low-magnitude variability of main quantities, which is often near the limits of instrument resolution. The recent development of new observational methods can overcome these problems and help to provide insight into physical processes in ice-covered lakes. The proposed research focuses on the description of transport processes within lakes and reservoirs, with an emphasis on the potential impacts of climate change. The proposed research combines unmanned, untethered, underwater robot development and application with conventional field data gathering techniques to collect data that will be used to describe the circulation in ice-free and ice-covered lakes, which will be used to develop and validate numerical hydrodynamic models. The end result of the proposed research will be an understanding of the physcial dynamics of targeted lakes, as well as a thoroughly tested numerical hydrodynamic model of those lakes. Results from targeted lakes will enhance numerical hydrodynamic model forecasting capabilities, which can be used as high quality input to numerical water quality and ecological models.