| For the last couple of decades, the Great Lakes have undergone rapid surface warming. In particular, the magnitude of the summer surface-warming trends of the Great Lakes have been much greater than those of surrounding land (Austin and Colman, 2007). Among the Great Lakes, the deepest Lake Superior exhibited the strongest warming trend in its annual, as well as summer surface water temperature. We find that many aspects of this behavior can be explained in terms of the tendency of deep lakes to exhibit multiple regimes characterized, under the same seasonally varying forcing, by the warmer and colder seasonal cycles exhibiting different amounts of wintertime lake-ice cover and corresponding changes in the summertime lake-surface temperatures. In this thesis, we address the problem of the Great Lakes' warming using one-dimensional lake modeling to interpret diverse observations of the recent lake behavior. (Abstract shortened by ProQuest.). |
