Attribution of global lake systems change to anthropogenic forcing

Grant, Luke; Vanderkelen, Inne; Gudmundsson, Lukas; Tan, Zeli; Perroud, Marjorie; Stepanenko, Victor M.; Debolskiy, Andrey V.; Droppers, Bram; Janssen, Annette B. G.; Woolway, R. Iestyn; Choulga, Margarita; Balsamo, Gianpaolo; Kirillin, Georgiy; Schewe, Jacob; Zhao, Fang; del Valle, Iliusi Vega; Golub, Malgorzata; Pierson, Don; Marcé, Rafael; Seneviratne, Sonia I.; Thiery, Wim

doi:10.1038/s41561-021-00833-x

Title: Attribution of global lake systems change to anthropogenic forcing

Journal Article · 18 October 2021 · Nature Geoscience

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/s41561-021-00833-x · OSTI ID:1837555

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Vrije Univ. Brussel (Germany)
ETH Zurich (Switzerland)
Pacific Northwest National Lab. (PNNL), Richland, WA (United States)
Univ. of Geneva (Switzerland)
Lomonosov Moscow State Univ. (Russia); Moscow Center for Fundamental and Applied Mathematics (Russia)
Lomonosov Moscow State Univ. (Russia); Moscow Center for Fundamental and Applied Mathematics (Russia); Russian Academy of Science, Moscow (Russia)
Wageningen Univ. & Research (The Netherlands)
European Space Agency Climate Office, Didcot (United Kingdom)
European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts (ECMWF), Reading (United Kingdom)
Leibniz-Inst. of Freshwater Ecology and Inland Fisheries, Berlin (Germany)
Potsdam Inst. for Climate Impact Research (Germany)
Uppsala Univ. (Sweden)
Catalan Inst. for Water Research (ICRA), Girona (Spain); Univ. of Girona (Spain)
Vrije Univ. Brussel (Germany); ETH Zurich (Switzerland)

Lake ecosystems are jeopardized by the impacts of climate change on ice seasonality and water temperatures. Yet historical simulations have not been used to formally attribute changes in lake ice and temperature to anthropogenic drivers. In addition, future projections of these properties are limited to individual lakes or global simulations from single lake models. Here we uncover the human imprint on lakes worldwide using hindcasts and projections from five lake models. Reanalysed trends in lake temperature and ice cover in recent decades are extremely unlikely to be explained by pre-industrial climate variability alone. Ice-cover trends in reanalysis are consistent with lake model simulations under historical conditions, providing attribution of lake changes to anthropogenic climate change. Moreover, lake temperature, ice thickness and duration scale robustly with global mean air temperature across future climate scenarios (+0.9 °C °C_air^–1, –0.033 m °C_air^–1 and –9.7 d °C_air^–1, respectively). Furthermore, these impacts would profoundly alter the functioning of lake ecosystems and the services they provide.

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Research Organization:: Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL), Richland, WA (United States)

Sponsoring Organization:: USDOE

Grant/Contract Number:: AC05-76RL01830

OSTI ID:: 1837555

Report Number(s):: PNNL-SA-156423

Journal Information:: Nature Geoscience, Vol. 14, Issue 11; ISSN 1752-0894

Publisher:: Nature Publishing GroupCopyright Statement

Country of Publication:: United States

Language:: English

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