Predicting Climate Change Impact on Physical Mass Transport in Lakes

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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.