No Arabic abstract
Deep water circulation and mixing processes in deep lakes are largely unknown, although they are responsible for the transport of matter, nutrients and pollutants. Such a lack of knowledge cannot be reliably provided by numerical hydrodynamic modelling studies because detailed observations are typically not available to validate them. To overcome some of these deficiencies, a dedicated yearlong mooring comprising 100 high-resolution temperature sensors and a single current meter were located in the deeper half of the 344 m deepest point of the subalpine Lake Garda (Italy). The observations show peaks and calms of turbulent exchange, besides ubiquitous internal wave activity. In late winter, northerly winds activate episodic deep convective overturning, the dense water being subsequently advected along the lake-floor. Besides deep convection, such winds also set-up seiches and inertial waves that are associated with about 100 times larger turbulence dissipation rates than that by semidiurnal internal wave breaking observed in summer. In the lower 60 m above the lake-floor however, the average turbulence dissipation rate is approximately constant in value year-around, being about 10 times larger than open-ocean values, except during deep convection episodes.
Marine life has been detected in the oceans trenches at great depths down to nearly 11 km. Such life is subject to particular environmental conditions of large static pressure exceeding 1000 atmosphere. While current flows are expected to be slow, waters cannot be stagnant with limited exchange of fresh nutrients needed to support life. For sufficient nutrient supply, the physics process of turbulent exchange is required. However, the environmental conditions hamper research in such waters. To study potential turbulent water motions, a string equipped with specially designed high-resolution temperature sensors was moored near the deepest point on Earth in the Challenger Deep, Mariana Trench for nearly three years. A preliminary analysis of a six-day period when the mooring was still demonstrates hundreds of meters slanted convection due to internal waves breaking from above. The associated turbulence dissipation rate with peak values hundred times above the background value is considered sufficient to maintain deep-trench life. Turbulence associates with one-ten thousandth of a degree temperature anomalies of about one hour duration.
Turbulent mixing processes in deep alpine Lake Garda (I) have not extensively been observed. Knowledge about drivers of turbulent fluxes are important for insights in the transport of matter, nutrients and pollutants, in the lake and in natural water bodies in general. In this paper, the occurrence of internal wave induced turbulent convection is addressed as opposed to the more common shear-induced turbulence in a density stratified environment. Observations are analyzed from a dedicated yearlong mooring holding 100 high-resolution temperature sensors at 1.5 m intervals under a single current meter in the deeper half of the 344 m deep lake-center. Episodically, the weakly density stratified waters in the lower 50 m above the lake floor show spectral slope and coherence evidence of short-term (15 to 30 minutes) convective motions under internal waves that are supported by the stronger stratified waters above. The near-homogeneous conditions are not attributable to frictional Ekman dynamics, but to large-scale internal wave crests.
Using meteor wind data from the Super Dual Auroral Radar Network (SuperDARN) in the Northern Hemisphere, we (1) demonstrate that the migrating (Sun-synchronous) tides can be separated from the nonmigrating components in the mesosphere and lower thermosphere (MLT) region and (2) use this to determine the response of the different components of the semidiurnal tide (SDT) to sudden stratospheric warming (SSW) conditions. The radars span a limited range of latitudes around 60$^{circ}$ N and are located over nearly 180$^{circ}$ of longitude. The migrating tide is extracted from the nonmigrating components observed in the meridional wind recorded from meteor ablation drift velocities around 95-km altitude, and a 20-year climatology of the different components is presented. The well-documented late summer and wintertime maxima in the semidiurnal winds are shown to be due primarily to the migrating SDT, whereas during late autumn and spring the nonmigrating components are at least as strong as the migrating SDT. The robust behavior of the SDT components during SSWs is then examined by compositing 13 SSW events associated with an elevated stratopause recorded between 1995 and 2013. The migrating SDT is seen to reduce in amplitude immediately after SSW onset and then return anomalously strongly around 10-17 days after the SSW onset. We conclude that changes in the underlying wind direction play a role in modulating the tidal amplitude during the evolution of SSWs and that the enhancement in the midlatitude migrating SDT (previously reported in modeling studies) is observed in the MLT at least up to 60$^{circ}$ N.
Plankton are effective indicators of environmental change and ecosystem health in freshwater habitats, but collection of plankton data using manual microscopic methods is extremely labor-intensive and expensive. Automated plankton imaging offers a promising way forward to monitor plankton communities with high frequency and accuracy in real-time. Yet, manual annotation of millions of images proposes a serious challenge to taxonomists. Deep learning classifiers have been successfully applied in various fields and provided encouraging results when used to categorize marine plankton images. Here, we present a set of deep learning models developed for the identification of lake plankton, and study several strategies to obtain optimal performances,which lead to operational prescriptions for users. To this aim, we annotated into 35 classes over 17900 images of zooplankton and large phytoplankton colonies, detected in Lake Greifensee (Switzerland) with the Dual Scripps Plankton Camera. Our best models were based on transfer learning and ensembling, which classified plankton images with 98% accuracy and 93% F1 score. When tested on freely available plankton datasets produced by other automated imaging tools (ZooScan, FlowCytobot and ISIIS), our models performed better than previously used models. Our annotated data, code and classification models are freely available online.
Methane ebullition (bubbling) from lake sediments is an important methane flux into the atmosphere. Previous studies have focused on the open-water season, showing that temperature variations, pressure fluctuations and wind-induced currents can affect ebullition. However, ebullition surveys during the ice-cover are rare despite the prevalence of seasonally ice-covered lakes, and the factors controlling ebullition are poorly understood. Here, we present a month-long, high frequency record of acoustic ebullition data from an ice-covered lake. The record shows that ebullition occurs almost exclusively when atmospheric pressure drops below a threshold that is approximately equal to the long-term average pressure. The intensity of ebullition is proportional to the amount by which the pressure drops below this threshold. In addition, field measurements of turbidity, in conjunction with laboratory experiments, provide evidence that ebullition is responsible for previously unexplained elevated levels of turbidity during ice-cover.