Principal Investigators: Dmitry Beletsky (CILER)

A Great Lakes version of the Princeton Ocean Model (POM) (Blumberg and Mellor, 1987) has recently been applied to Lake Champlain to study internal seiche dynamics in the lake. In the past, the model was used to study internal Kelvin waves in Lake Michigan (Beletsky et al., 1997). The model was applied to idealized and realistic bathymetry cases in order to understand factors influencing dynamics of internal surges and seiches. Model results for idealized bathymetry were compared with observations of currents and temperature in Lake Champlain collected by GLERL scientists during 1993-1998 (Beletsky et al., 2000) and showed qualitative match. Unfortunately, the model did not produce physically realistic results in the case of realistic bathymetry because of excessive numerical noise. The purpose of this proposal is to extend the previous modeling results to do a more systematic study of the effects of bathymetry and stratification in Lake Champlain using another version of the Princeton Ocean Model, which uses different vertical coordinate system and maybe less prone to numerical noise. This proposal should also be considered as a first step in preparation for seasonal simulations of circulation and thermal structure in Lake Champlain. Our main objective is to understand the effects of bathymetry and stratification on currents and circulation in Lake Champlain.