Snowpack determines relative importance of climate factors driving summer lake warming

Mountain lakes experience extreme interannual climate variation as well as rapidly warming air temperatures, making them ideal systems to understand lake‐climate responses. Snowpack and water temperature are highly correlated in mountain lakes, but we lack a complete understanding of underlying mechanisms. Motivated by predicted declines in snowfall with future temperature increases, we investigated how surface heat fluxes and lake warming responded to variation in snowpack, ice‐off, and summer weather patterns in a high elevation lake in the Sierra Nevada, California. Ice‐off timing determined the phenology of lake exposure to solar radiation, and was the dominant mechanism linking snowpack to lake temperature. The relative importance of heat loss fluxes (longwave radiation, latent and sensible heat exchange) varied among wet and dry years. Declines in snowpack and ice cover in mountain systems will reduce variability in lake thermal responses and increase the responsiveness of lake warming to atmospheric forcing.

• Publication year

  2020

• Venue

  Limnology and Oceanography Letters

• Publication date

  2020-01-14

• Fields of study

  Environmental Science

• Identifiers
  DOI 10.1002/lol2.10147
• External record

  Open on Semantic Scholar

• Source metadata

  Semantic Scholar

• No claims are published for this paper.

• No concepts are published for this paper.

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