Abstract
Limnology, the science of lakes, has been in the past primarily a field of activity of the biological and chemical sciences with only limited interaction with physics. This fact has its historical justification as the study of lakes has primarily been motivated by questions of biological concern, and these are deeply rooted in the life sciences among which biology and chemistry play an important role. A certain significance of physics has nevertheless always been accepted – for instance, the seasonal variation of the temperature distribution in a lake has always been recognised to be the result of solar radiation and wind action at the water surface.
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Notes
- 1.
In lake waters the density is in many cases negligibly affected by the content of the minerals – the salts. This is not so in the ocean, in fjords and lagoons, as well as in salty lakes. The density structure is physically important.
- 2.
The word ‘seiche’ derives from old French as spoken in the Roman part of Switzerland ‘sec’ and means ‘dry’. It has been used in the 19th century (by Forel [9] and earlier) in the region of Lake Geneva to denote the surface oscillation of the water level along the shore, drying periodically a strip of the shoreline. Today by ‘seiche’ a periodic lake oscillation is generally meant. According to Forel, the word ‘seiche’ characterising lake oscillations, is due to Fatio de Duillier [4] and occurred in his paper in 1730.
- 3.
Turbulence arose from the recognition that the flow of water, e.g., in a pipe can have two distinct appearances: (i) laminar flow, in which the flow is smooth and streaklines from a point source are maintained as small filaments and (ii) turbulent flow, in which the filaments are torn apart and spread over larger regions of the domain of the fluid. For instance, the streakline of the smoke of a still cigarette is smooth and narrowly confined for a certain distance and then suddenly torn apart and wound in complicated gyres or eddies . Such eddies of many sizes are a typical characteristic of turbulent flow, and they affect fluid mechanics of lakes substantially.
- 4.
Data in this section have been collected mainly by consulting sources in the Internet, e.g. http://www.ilec.or.jp.
- 5.
For pure water the density maximum is reached at 3.8°C, but many parameterisations use 4°C instead.
- 6.
Wind set-up is used to mean the inclination of the lake surface set-up under the action of a steady (uniform) wind blowing along a lake surface.
- 7.
Henceforth, we shall use the denotations ‘littoral’ and pelagial to denote these disjoint zones. This is used in limnology, while in oceanography, ‘littoral’ means ‘a coastal zone between high and low tide marks’.
- 8.
The sediments, free of vegetation, that lie below the pelagial zone are referred to as the profundal zone .
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Hutter, K., Wang, Y., Chubarenko, I.P. (2011). Introduction. In: Physics of Lakes. Advances in Geophysical and Environmental Mechanics and Mathematics. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-15178-1_1
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