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Models of lake physical processes provide the lower flux boundary conditions for numerical predictions of weather and climate in lake basins. So far, there have been few studies on evaluating lake model performance at the diurnal time scale and against flux observations. The goal of this paper is to evaluate the National Center for Atmospheric Research Community Land Model version 4–Lake, Ice, Snow and Sediment Simulator using the eddy covariance and water temperature data obtained at a subtropical freshwater lake, Lake Taihu, in China. Both observations and model simulations reveal that convective overturning was commonplace at night and timed when water switched from being statically stable to being unstable. By reducing the water thermal diffusivity to 2% of the value calculated with the Henderson–Sellers parameterization, the model was able to reproduce the observed diurnal variations in water surface temperature and in sensible and latent heat fluxes. The small diffusivity suggests that the drag force of the sediment layer in this large (2500 km2) and shallow (2-m depth) lake may be strong, preventing unresolved vertical motions and suppressing wind-induced turbulence. Model results show that a large fraction of the incoming solar radiation energy was stored in the water during the daytime, and the stored energy was diffused upward at night to sustain sensible and latent heat fluxes to the atmosphere. Such a lake–atmosphere energy exchange modulated the local climate at the daily scale in this shallow lake, which is not seen in deep lakes where dominant lake–atmosphere interactions often occur at the seasonal scale.

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