Abstract
Lake surface water temperatures (LSWTs) are sensitive to climate change, but previous studies have typically focused on temperatures from only the last few decades. Thus, while there is good appreciation of LSWT warming in recent decades, our understanding of longer-term temperature change is comparatively limited. In this study, we use a mechanistically based open-source model (air2water), driven by air temperature from a state-of-the-art global atmospheric reanalysis (ERA-20C) and calibrated with satellite-derived LSWT observations (ARC-Lake v3), to investigate the long-term change in LSWT worldwide. The predictive ability of the model is tested across 606 lakes, with 91% of the lakes showing a daily root mean square error smaller than 1.5 °C. Model performance was better at mid-latitudes and decreased towards the equator. The results illustrated highly variable mean annual LSWT trends during the twentieth century and across climatic regions. Substantial warming is evident after ~ 1980 and the most responsive lakes to climate change are located in the temperate regions.
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15 May 2020
This article has been updated. The online published PDF contained mistakes in Eqs. 1 and 2. These have been corrected.
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Acknowledgements
RIW received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 Programme for Research and Innovation (Grant Agreement No. 640171) and from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under the Marie Skłodowska-Curie Grant Agreement No. 791812. The authors acknowledge the European Space Agency funding of the ARC-Lake project. Satellite lake temperature data are available at http://www.laketemp.net. The lake model used is available to download from https://github.com/spiccolroaz/air2water.
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Piccolroaz, S., Woolway, R.I. & Merchant, C.J. Global reconstruction of twentieth century lake surface water temperature reveals different warming trends depending on the climatic zone. Climatic Change 160, 427–442 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10584-020-02663-z
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10584-020-02663-z