Dr. Jim Selegean is an environmental engineer with the US Army Corps of Engineers. Dr. Selegean directs the Great Lakes Sediment Lab and will be talking about forecasting water levels in the Great Lakes in a changing climate.

Dr. Jim Selegean
US Army Corps of Engineers
Hydraulics and Hydrology Division

Great Lakes Water Levels in a Changing Climate

Fluctuating water levels on the Great Lakes can significantly affect ecosystems, coastal erosion, recreation, shipping/boating and consumptive uses of water.  In support of these uses, the Army Corps of Engineers publishes a forecast of lake levels each month, which is largely based on the creation of a monthly water budget for each lake.  This presentation will discuss the role that evaporation, precipitation, ice cover and outflows play in creating such a forecast.  Future forecasts are complicated by non-stationarity of some of the key pieces of the water budget.  To gain a sense for what sort of lake levels we might encounter in future climates, we employed a weather generator to create 1000-year time series of precipitation and evaporation and used that to model potential lake levels.  We examined a number of future scenarios that were warmer, wetter and dryer to gain an understanding of the likely range in high and low water levels.