The onset of summer stratification in temperate lakes and reservoirs forces a decoupling of the hypolimnion from the epilimnion that is sustained by strong density gradients in the metalimnion. These strong gradients act as a barrier to the vertical transport of mass and scalars leading to bottom anoxia and subsequent nutrient release from the sediments. The stratification is intermittently overcome by turbulent mixing events that redistribute mass, heat, dissolved parameters and particulates in the vertical. The redistribution of ecological parameters then exerts some control over the ecological response of the lake. This dissertation is focused on the physics of deep vertical mixing that occurs beneath the well-mixed surface layer in stratified lakes and reservoirs. The overall aim is to improve the ability of numerical models to reproduce deep vertical mixing, thus providing better tools for water quality prediction and management. In the first part of this research the framework of a one-dimensional mixed-layer hydrodynamic model was used to construct a pseudo two-dimensional model that computes vertical fluxes generated by deep mixing processes. The parameterisations developed for the model were based on the relationship found between lake-wide vertical buoyancy flux and the first-order internal wave response of the lake to surface wind forcing. The ability of the model to reproduce the observed thermal structure in a range of lakes and reservoirs was greatly improved by incorporating an explicit turbulent benthic boundary layer routine. Although laterally-integrated models reproduce the net effect of turbulent mixing in a vertical sense, they fail to resolve the transient distribution of turbulent mixing events triggered by local flow properties defined at far smaller scales. Importantly, the distribution of events may promote tertiary motions and ecological niches. In the second part of the study a large body of microstructure data collected in Lake Kinneret, Israel, was used to show that the nature of turbulent mixing events varied considerably between the epilimnion, metalimnion, hypolimnion and benthic boundary layer, yet the turbulent scales of the events and the buoyancy flux they produced collapsed into functions of the local gradient Richardson number. It was found that the most intense events in the metalimnion were triggered by high-frequency waves generated near the surface that grew and imparted a strain on the metalimnion density field, which led to secondary instabilities with low gradient Richardson numbers. The microstructure observations suggest that the local gradient Richardson number could be used to parameterise vertical mixing in coarse-grid numerical models of lakes and reservoirs. However, any effort to incorporate such parameterisations becomes meaningless without measures to reduce numerical diffusion, which often dominates over parameterised physical mixing. As a third part of the research, an explicit filtering tool was developed to negate numerical diffusion in a threedimensional hydrodynamic model. The adaptive filter ensured that temperature gradients in the metalimnion remained within bounds of the measured values and so the computation preserved the spectrum of internal wave motions that trigger diapycnal mixing events in the deeper reaches of a lake. The results showed that the ratio of physical to numerical diffusion is dictated by the character of the dominant internal wave motions.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:ADTP/185652 |
| Date | January 2008 |
| Creators | Yeates, Peter Stafford |
| Publisher | University of Western Australia. Centre for Water Research |
| Source Sets | Australiasian Digital Theses Program |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Rights | Copyright Peter Stafford Yeates, http://www.itpo.uwa.edu.au/UWA-Computer-And-Software-Use-Regulations.html |
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