Date of Award

2025

Document Type

Open Access Dissertation

Degree Name

Doctor of Philosophy in Civil Engineering (PhD)

Administrative Home Department

Department of Civil, Environmental, and Geospatial Engineering

Advisor 1

Pengfei Xue

Committee Member 1

Jiali Wang

Committee Member 2

David W. Watkins

Committee Member 3

Brian D. Barkdoll

Committee Member 4

Gangfeng Ma

Abstract

The overarching objective of this dissertation is to enhance our predictive understanding of the Great Lakes regional climate by utilizing advanced modeling techniques and provide comprehensive insights into the future of the Great Lakes. This dissertation focuses on four areas pertinent to the future of the Great Lakes hydroclimate and extreme events, beginning with the derivation of robust water level projections for the Great Lakes in Chapter 2. Using a regional climate modeling system with a two-way coupled three-dimensional (3D) hydrodynamic lake and ice model for the Great lakes, we analyze long-term future changes in the over-lake precipitation, lake evaporation, and basin runoff under climate change and provide insights into future hydrological trends. In Chapter 3, we employ a storyline approach and focus on a unique Great Lakes coastal hazard, lake-effect snow (LES) storms. Specifically, we create a storyline that describes a physically self-consistent unfolding of the November 2022 Buffalo, New York LES storm under the warmer future climate. Our storyline provides one of many plausible futures for the Buffalo LES storm and answers the societally relevant question of what could happen to the storm under a warmer climate. In Chapter 4, we explore the novel concept of subsurface heatwaves in the Great Lakes. With thermal extremes becoming more prominent in recent decades, our first-of-its-kind examination of subsurface heatwaves offers a unique perspective on Great Lakes warming from a vertical standpoint. This study highlights how aquatic species are being forced to adapt to the deepening of thermal refuges and increasing of compound heatwaves, shedding light on the ecological impacts of these emerging thermal extremes. Lastly in Chapter 5, we delve deeper into the behavior of regional climate modeling systems, which are the primary tool for climate change research. More specifically, we explore the influence of lake-atmosphere interaction on the simulated lake surface temperature within a newly developed regional climate modeling system. We use a twin experiment to evaluate the impact of a two-way coupling between an atmosphere model and a 3D hydrodynamic lake and ice model on the simulated summer lake surface temperature through lake-atmosphere interactions. The insights from this study provide crucial information on how, in a two-way coupled system where errors or biases are allowed to freely propagate, lake surface temperature is modulated through surface heat fluxes which influence various meteorological state variables that interact with lake surface temperatures.

Creative Commons License

Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License.

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