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The Cooling and Heating Impacts of a Lake and a Nearby Wetland Under Current and Changing Climate
  • Henrique Vieira,
  • Ali Nazemi
Henrique Vieira
Concordia University

Corresponding Author:[email protected]

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Ali Nazemi
Concordia University
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Abstract

Understanding the effect of different landscapes on local temperature is important for understanding land-atmospheric interactions, and is a critical step toward an informed urban design under a changing climate. This presentation considers Lake Memphremagog, a transboundary water body between Quebec and Vermont, along with one of its adjacent wetlands as a test bed to study the impact of different water bodies on regulating the local temperature. We use the data from two identical climate stations to study hourly temperature, absolute and relative humidity as well as incoming and outgoing radiation components along with vapour pressure deficit at the lake and wetland. We benchmark the temperature measurements in these two sites with the data gauged in an Environment and Climate Change Canada’s weather station located between the two sites. Using a systematic analysis, we account for the cooling and heating impacts of the lake and the wetland and demonstrate their underlying causes. We show that during the growing season and at the daily scale, the cooling impacts of the wetland can cancel out the heating impacts of the lake. This is not the case during day times, in which the lake acts as a sink of heat, while the wetland is the source. We show that the cooling and heating effects of the considered lake-wetland duo can be described by the daily temperature statistics (i.e. average, minimum, maximum and range) at the benchmark weather station. This provides an opportunity to create stochastic models for retrospective and prospective projections of cooling and heating impacts of this lake-wetland duo under current and future climate.