Chapters authored
Climatic Change in a Large Shallow Tropical Lake Chapala, Mexico
Measurements of temperature, currents and lake level taken in 2005–2014 are analyzed and discussed. We obtained a conceptually new data set on the formation of the thermocline in Lake Chapala. It is showed that the thermocline in the lake occurs only during the daytime, in the top 0.5–1.0-m layer of the water column, whereby the vertical temperature gradient reaches 2.5°C/m within that layer. At night, the top layer is cooled, which causes strong vertical mixing down to the bottom. Moored measurements of temperature and level from Lake Chapala reveal the presence of seiches oscillations with periods of 5.7 and 2.8 hours with amplitudes of 15.4 and 8.1 mm. Temperature measurements on sections across the lake showed that in the northern part of the lake, the water column is warmer that in southern 2–3°C in all seasons. The lake currents were simulated for wet and dry seasons. The model results are in good agreement with the acoustic Doppler current profiler (ADCP) data. The presence of an anticyclone gyre in the central part of the lake in both seasons is detected.
Part of the book: Lake Sciences and Climate Change