Modelling of depth profiles of the water temperature in the Lake Sidi Ali (Morocco)

ABSTRACT

Water temperature is a fundamental physical property with a direct impact on all organisms inhabiting the aquatic environment. Because predicting the water temperature is important for maintaining water quality and for ecosystem management. Additionally, lake water temperature is one of the key parameters in determining the ecological condition within a lake, as it influences chemical and biological processes. In this paper, the Sidi Ali Lake (Morocco) was selected as the research object, and the Bulk freshwater lake model is used to simulate the variation of thermal regime affected by climate changes over a 35-yrs period. It is demonstrated that the model reproduces the results of field measurement data for all observed periods. The numerical results for the thermal regimes are in the best quantitative and qualitative agreement with the real vertical profiles, which suggests that the predictive model can be used to obtain a first-order estimation of vertical water temperature in Moroccan Lakes.

KEYWORDS:

• Vertical water temperature
• field observations
• numerical model
• Sidi Ali Lake (Morocco)

Acknowledgements

The authors gratefully acknowledge anonymous reviewers for their scientific suggestions and constructive comments. Additionally, the authors specifically acknowledge Dr, Chen, Z at the University of British Columbia, Canada for improving their English.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).