Evaluation of the WRF-Lake Model in the Large Dimictic Reservoir: Comparisons with Field Data and Another Water Temperature Model

Abstract

The WRF-lake, as a one-dimensional (1D) lake model popularly used for coupling with the Weather Research and Forecasting (WRF) system and modelling lake atmosphere interactions, does not consider the heat exchange caused by inflow outflow, which is an important characteristic of large reservoirs and can affect the energy budget and reservoir-atmosphere interactions. We evaluated the WRF-lake model by applying it at a large dimictic reservoir, Miyun Reservoir, in northern China. The results show that the WRF-lake model, though ignoring inflow-outflow, yields good surface water temperature simulation through reasonable parameterization. The Minlake model, as a better physically-based model in reservoirs, was used to test the effect of inflow-outflow, including heat carried by inflow-outflow water exchange and water level change on the 1D model’s performance. The effect of heat carried by inflow-outflow is mainly in summer, negatively correlated with hydraulic residence time and positively correlated with temperature difference between inflow and outflow. For a reservoir with hydraulic residence time of 3 years and temperature difference between inflow and outflow about 10 ° in summer, the heat carried by inflow-outflow is far less than the heat exchange through the surface (< 2 %), therefore, has little influence on total energy balance. The effect of water level change is mainly on latent heat and sensible heat in unit area, rather than outgoing longwave radiation. Though influencing the temperature in deep layers, the water level change does not have a significant impact on the surface temperature.

Lake Water Temperature Modeling in an Era of Climate Change: Data Sources, Models, and Future Prospects

“…As a result, important interactions between the two systems may not be captured. Two-way coupling solves this issue by fully integrating the climate and lake models, enabling the feedback impact of lake thermal processes on regional climate to be considered (Guo et al, 2022;Mallard et al, 2014). A typical example of two-way coupling is given by the models sensu Henderson-Sellers (1985), and other examples have been implemented in the Community Land surface Model (CLM-Lake) (Oleson et al, 2013), Common Land Model (CoLM-Lake) (Dai et al, 2018), Community Earth System Model (CESM-LISS) (Lawrence et al, 2019;Subin et al, 2012), and the Weather Research and Forecast model (WRF-Lake) (Gu et al, 2015).…”

“…A typical example of two‐way coupling is given by the models sensu Henderson‐Sellers (1985), and other examples have been implemented in the Community Land surface Model (CLM‐Lake) (Oleson et al., 2013), Common Land Model (CoLM‐Lake) (Dai et al., 2018), Community Earth System Model (CESM‐LISS) (Lawrence et al., 2019; Subin et al., 2012), and the Weather Research and Forecast model (WRF‐Lake) (Gu et al., 2015). Two way coupling has been widely used to study lake/reservoir thermal dynamics, lake ice coverage, lake–atmosphere interactions, and climate change effects on lakes (see e.g., Guo et al., 2022, 2023a; Gu et al., 2015; F. Wang et al., 2019; Wu et al., 2020; X. Wang et al., 2023; Xiao et al., 2016). Another example is the FLake model, which has been coupled in one‐way with ERA40 reanalysis data (Martynov et al., 2010) and WRF (Gula & Peltier, 2012), and incorporated as a lake parameterization scheme into the Consortium for Small‐scale Modeling—COSMO model (Mironov et al., 2010) and coupled in two‐way model configurations with WRF (Mallard et al., 2014).…”

“…A typical example of two-way coupling is given by the models sensu Henderson-Sellers (1985), and other examples have been implemented in the Community Land surface Model (CLM-Lake) (Oleson et al, 2013), Common Land Model (CoLM-Lake) (Dai et al, 2018), Community Earth System Model (CESM-LISS) (Lawrence et al, 2019;Subin et al, 2012), and the Weather Research and Forecast model (WRF-Lake) (Gu et al, 2015). Two way coupling has been widely used to study lake/reservoir thermal dynamics, lake ice coverage, lake-atmosphere interactions, and climate change effects on lakes (see e.g., Guo et al, 2022Guo et al, , 2023aGu et al, 2015;F. Wang et al, 2019;Wu et al, 2020;Xiao et al, 2016).…”