Theses and Dissertations

Jacob Wiley

Issuing Body

Mississippi State University

Advisor

Mercer, Andrew

Committee Member

Fuhrmann, Christopher

Committee Member

Dyer, Jamie

Date of Degree

8-10-2018

Document Type

Graduate Thesis - Open Access

Major

Professional Meteorology/Climatology

Degree Name

Master of Science

College

College of Arts and Sciences

Department

Department of Geosciences

Abstract

The Weather Research and Forecast model (WRF) was utilized to study the effects of warmer lake surface temperatures on the lake effect snow (LES) environments of Lake Erie and Lake Ontario. Composites of recorded LES cases were created for WRF input to represent average LES conditions which revealed three distinct large-scale patterns. WRF runs consisted of altering lake temperatures up to 4.3°C for three future time frames. Lake Erie projections exhibited more sensitivity to alterations as more WRF runs revealed significant (p-value ≤ 0.05) changes to the environment. Lake Erie solely showed any distinctive changes with early and mid-century WRF runs with increased surface CAPE around 80 J/kg and total precipitation around 1.5 mm. Late century alterations for both lakes revealed significant (p-value ≤ 0.05) changes including up to 2.1 g/kg increased specific humidity and a 9K surface-850mb temperature difference indicating both lakes were most sensitive to late century alterations.

URI

https://hdl.handle.net/11668/19774

Comments

synoptic||mesoscale||climate change||numerical weather prediction

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