Study of freeze-thaw cycle and key radiation transfer parameters in a Tibetan Plateau lake using LAKE2.0 model and field observations

Abstract

The Tibetan Plateau (TP) lakes are sensitive to climate change due to its seasonal ice cover, but few studies have paid attention to the freeze-thaw process of TP lakes and its key control parameters. By combining 216 simulation experiments using the LAKE2.0 model with the observations, we evaluated the effects of ice and snow albedo, ice (Kdi) and water (Kdw) extinction coefficients on the lake ice phenology, water temperature, sensible and latent heat fluxes. The reference experiment performs well in simulating the lake temperature, with a small positive bias increasing with depth, but it underestimates the ice thickness. The increase of ice albedo, snow albedo and Kdi induce a significant decrease in water temperature. Compared with the latent heat, the sensible heat flux is more sensitive to these three parameters. The ice thickness increases almost linearly with the increase of ice albedo but decreases with the increase of Kdi. The ice thickness and frozen days vary little with Kdw, but increasing Kdw can decrease the water temperature. Compared with the ice albedo, the Kdi and snow albedo have a large effect on the number of frozen days. This study brings to light the necessity to improve the parameterizations of the TP lakes freeze-thaw process.

Keywords

• Albedo
• extinction coefficient
• lake ice
• snow
• Tibetan Plateau