Affiliation:
1. Department of Infrastructure Engineering University of Melbourne VIC Parkville Australia
2. Department of Atmospheric Sciences National Taiwan University Taipei Taiwan
3. Bureau of Meteorology Melbourne VIC Australia
4. Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences Harvard University Cambridge MA USA
5. School of Engineering and Applied Sciences Harvard University Cambridge MA USA
Abstract
AbstractFor 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.
Publisher
American Geophysical Union (AGU)
Subject
General Earth and Planetary Sciences,Geophysics