The study is an important step in monitoring the health of a large lake like Lake Geneva, which plays a central role in the ecosystem and provides people living in the surrounding area with part of their drinking water. (Photo: Claudia Ofelio)
The study is an important step in monitoring the health of a large lake like Lake Geneva, which plays a central role in the ecosystem and provides people living in the surrounding area with part of their drinking water. (Photo: Claudia Ofelio) - Changing temperatures and varying winds over the seasons cause great fluctuations in Lake Geneva. The LéXPLORE research platform monitored the movement of water within the lake for a year to learn more about how natural factors influence the lake's mixing. The resulting analysis now paints a fuller picture of mixing in large lakes, which had previously only been studied over shorter time periods. From April 2019 to April 2020, LéXPLORE scientists recorded a set of data that includes wind speed, current velocity, temperature and turbulence - all indicators that shed light on how mixing takes place in Lake Geneva's water column over the course of a year. They have just published their findings in Communications Earth & Environment, a publication of the Springer Nature group. Mixing plays an essential role in how large lakes supply oxygen and nutrients to their fauna and flora, yet technical limitations have thus far hindered scientists from understanding how this phenomenon is affected by changes in solar heating and wind energy across the seasons, which EPFL has already analysed recently.
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