A framework for ensemble modelling of climate change impacts on lakes worldwide : the ISIMIP Lake Sector

Empirical evidence demonstrates that lakes and reservoirs are warming across the globe. Consequently, there is an increased need to project future changes in lake thermal structure and resulting changes in lake biogeochemistry in order to plan for the likely impacts. Previous studies of the impacts of climate change on lakes have often relied on a single model forced with limited scenario-driven projections of future climate for a relatively small number of lakes. As a result, our understanding of the effects of climate change on lakes is fragmentary, based on scattered studies using different data sources and modelling protocols, and mainly focused on individual lakes or lake regions. This has precluded identification of the main impacts of climate change on lakes at global and regional scales and has likely contributed to the lack of lake water quality considerations in policy-relevant documents, such as the Assessment Reports of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). Here, we describe a simulation protocol developed by the Lake Sector of the Inter-Sectoral Impact Model Intercomparison Project (ISIMIP) for simulating climate change impacts on lakes using an ensemble of lake models and climate change scenarios for ISIMIP phases 2 and 3. The protocol prescribes lake simulations driven by climate forcing from gridded observations and different Earth system models under various representative greenhouse gas concentration pathways (RCPs), all consistently bias-corrected on a 0.5 degrees x 0.5 degrees global grid. In ISIMIP phase 2, 11 lake models were forced with these data to project the thermal structure of 62 well-studied lakes where data were available for calibration under historical conditions, and using uncalibrated models for 17 500 lakes defined for all global grid cells containing lakes. In ISIMIP phase 3, this approach was expanded to consider more lakes, more models, and more processes. The ISIMIP Lake Sector is the largest international effort to project future water temperature, thermal structure, and ice phenology of lakes at local and global scales and paves the way for future simulations of the impacts of climate change on water quality and biogeochemistry in lakes.Peer reviewe

Reasons and patterns of spatio-temporal variability of methane emission from the Mozhaysk reservoir in summer period

Anthropogenic reservoirs are not only sources of clean energy, flow regulators, recreational and food resources, but also sources of greenhouse gases such as methane. The studies presented in this work, done on a well-studied low-flowing valley reservoir mainly in the summer, when the greatest variability of methane fluxes was observe. Depending on synoptic conditions, the temporal variability of methane fluxes varies greatly. Methane fluxes increase during the summer period and huge methane emissions observed before the autumn mixing stage. Emissions can occur during the destruction of temperature stratification, as a result of stormy weather. With such emissions, methane fluxes into the atmosphere can reach about 20 mgC*m-2*d-1, which is higher than the emission during convection. Revealing the patterns of spatio-temporal distribution of methane fluxes will help to determine the contribution of water bodies (in particular reservoirs) to the total methane budget of the atmosphere more accurately