Open AccessA slab model of the Great Salt Lake for regional climate simulation
Author(s) -
Strong C.,
Kochanski A. K.,
Crosman E. T.
Publication year - 2014
Publication title -
journal of advances in modeling earth systems
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 3.03
H-Index - 58
ISSN - 1942-2466
DOI - 10.1002/2014ms000305
Subject(s) - environmental science , salt lake , climate change , climate model , precipitation , elevation (ballistics) , climatology , atmospheric sciences , mixing (physics) , slab , range (aeronautics) , spring (device) , satellite , hydrology (agriculture) , meteorology , geology , oceanography , geography , geomorphology , geometry , mathematics , materials science , engineering , composite material , mechanical engineering , physics , geotechnical engineering , structural basin , quantum mechanics , aerospace engineering , geophysics
Abstract A slab lake model was developed for the Great Salt Lake (GSL) and coupled to a regional climate model to enable better evaluation of regional effects of projected climate change. The GSL is hypersaline with an area of approximately 4400 km 2 , and its notable shallowness (the deeper sections average 6.5–9 m at current lake levels) renders it highly sensitive to climate change. A time‐independent (constant) effective mixing depth of approximately 5 m was determined for the GSL by numerically optimizing model‐observation agreement, and improvement gained using a time‐dependent effective mixing depth assumption was smaller than the uncertainty in the satellite‐based observations. The slab model with constant effective mixing depth accounted for more than 97% of the variance in satellite‐based observations of GSL surface temperature for years 2001 through 2003. Using a lake surface temperature climatology in place of the lake model resulted in annual mean near‐surface air temperature differences that were small (∼10 −2 K) away from the lake, but differences in annual precipitation downstream reached 3 cm (4.5%) mainly because of enhanced turbulent heat fluxes off the lake during spring. When subjected to a range of pseudo global warming scenarios, the annual mean lake surface temperature increased by 0.8°C per degree of air temperature increase.