Lake Surface Water Temperature Working Group (LSWT-WG)
The GHRSST LSWT-WG was set up at the 10th GHRSST Science Team meeting (Santa Rosa, Ca. USA) to coordinate international activities related to the treatment of Lake Surface Water Temperature and lake/land masks in GHRSST data products. the LSWT-WG shall provide a set of guidance to the GDS-TAG on how to proceed with a common definition of lakes/land masks.
The impact of LSWT is an issue for NWP systems. The interaction of the atmosphere with the underlying surface is strongly dependent on the surface temperature and its time-rate-of-change. (Most) NWP systems assume that the water surface temperature can be kept constant over the forecast period. The assumption is doubtful for small-to-medium size relatively shallow lakes, where the diurnal variations of the surface temperature reach several degrees. A large number of such lakes will become resolved-scale features as the horizontal resolution is increased. Apart from forecasting the lake surface temperature, its initialisation is also an issue.
Lakes strongly modify the structure and the transport properties of the tmospheric surface layer. A major outstanding question is the arameterisation of the roughness of the water surface with respect to wind (e.g. limited fetch) and to scalar quantities. (See Mironov, DWD)
The group is led by Bob Grumbine (robert.grumbine@noaa.gov)- please contact Bob for more information on how to get involved.
Here is an example of the Great Lakes Surface Water Temperature analysis from NOAA (Click to see current map):
Useful links:
The following pages provide some useful links to LSWT pages.
Lake model intercomparison project: http://www.unige.ch/climate/lakemip/index.html
Parameterisation of Lake-Atmosphere interaction for NWP: http://pbl-nato-arw.dmi.dk/Presentations/Mironov.pdf
Retrieving LSWT from ESA AATSR: http://www.geos.ed.ac.uk/arclake/
Coastwatch pages of great lakes http://www.coastwatch.msu.edu/
Animation of great lakes LSWT http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dheYEyH5c5E
(Last Updated: 17-06-2010)