Assessing future effects on lake ecosystem resilience using data analysis and dynamic modelling : Modelling the effects of extreme weather events and climate warming on lakes

Abstract: Extreme weather events can have short-term and long-term effects on lake thermal structure, nutrient dynamics, and community composition. Moreover, changes in lake variables induced by global climate change may influence the response and recovery of lake ecosystems to extreme weather events. The linkage between extreme weather and lakes includes interactions between physics and biology, and long-term and short-term dynamics, which are not yet well understood. Process-based modelling is used in this thesis to further explore this topic, and to assess how lake responses to extreme weather events may change under the influence of climate warming.Lake-internal feedback mechanisms were shown to potentially cause sudden shifts in climate-induced transitions in lake mixing regimes, with a role for extreme weather events to induce such shifts. Additionally, one-dimensional physical lake models performed well in reproducing trends in lake variables during storms and heatwaves in a study covering multiple locations and models. However, extreme weather events still presented periods of increased model uncertainty, which should be taken into account. A software package was developed to promote the use of ensemble lake modelling, which is one way to include uncertainty in model forecasting efforts. This could be particularly helpful in periods of extreme weather. With tools and theory now in place, a coupled physical-biogeochemical model was then used to assess what are the most important drivers of how lake phytoplankton responds to storms, and how this response might change with climate warming. Storm intensity, thermal structure, nutrients, and light all affected the phytoplankton concentration after storms. Moderate wind speeds had increasing effects compared to high wind speeds, but a sufficiently deep mixed layer reduced the response to wind strongly. Higher nutrients and light promoted increasing effects of wind, and higher temperatures promoted decreasing effects. The response of phytoplankton to storms did not change markedly between present-day and future-climate scenarios.This thesis furthers our understanding of the processes involved in extreme events acting on lakes. A more complete understanding is necessary to develop more reliable models and anticipate future conditions. Furthermore, modelling was shown to be a viable approach to study these events and validation data and tools were provided to increase the reliability of this method. In these times of increasing environmental pressures and changing extreme weather patterns, more insight into future effects of extreme events is much needed.