1. Negligible Impact on Precipitation From a Permanent Inland Lake in Central Australia.
- Author
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Yang, Zhiyuan, Ryu, Dongryeol, Lo, Min‐Hui, Peel, Murray C., Narsey, Sugata Y., and McColl, Kaighin A.
- Subjects
EVAPORATIVE cooling ,LAKES ,WATER in agriculture ,ARID regions agriculture ,AGRICULTURAL water supply - Abstract
For over a century, numerous proposals for increasing available water in central Australia have been raised, inspired in part by the natural occurrence of the ephemeral lake, Kati Thanda‐Lake Eyre. It has also been proposed that additional rainfall generated by the lake would spread beyond the lake itself, potentially opening up large tracts of uncultivated land to dryland agriculture. Here we use a climate model to examine how adding a permanent lake to Australia's arid center might influence local and regional precipitation. Locally, evaporative cooling from the lake increases low‐level divergence, suppressing precipitation. Regionally, additional moisture from the lake is spread thinly over the Australian continent, resulting in little change to total precipitation. Overall, our results do not support the assertion that maintaining a large inland lake like Kati Thanda‐Lake Eyre in central Australia would significantly increase precipitation, either locally or regionally. Plain Language Summary: The Bradfield water scheme proposed opening central Australia up to agriculture by diverting water inland. Supporters of the plan have argued that this might also increase rainfall. We use a climate model to simulate how precipitation would be impacted by an idealized permanent lake in central Australia. The model simulations show that the presence of a large lake has negligible impact on rainfall, both locally and regionally. Key Points: A climate model is used to test the hypothesis that creating a large lake in central Australia would increase rainfallLocally, surface cooling effects of the lake suppress the formation of precipitationRegionally, moisture from the lake is exported to other areas but the amount is small compared to natural variability in Australian rainfall [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]
- Published
- 2023
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