A Theoretical Study of the Lake and Land Breezes of Circular Lakes

Abstract

Abstract In this paper the authors study the lake and land breezes of a mesometearological system consisting of a circular lake and a level land area surrounding it. It is assumed that initially the atmosphere is at rest, the meteorological variables being uniform along horizontal planes. At time t=0, a diurnal temperature wave is imposed on the land surface and the resulting circulation is studied through the application of the non- linear equations of motion and heat conduction for an axially symmetric flow system. In the numerical solution we consider two lake sizes: one of 25 km radius (“small”lake) and the other one of 50 km radius (“large”lake). In both lake-size cases the landward penetration of the cool lake air takes place along a front. As the lake breezes are divergent horizontally, and those of the small lake are more strongly divergent, and as horizontal divergence of winds tends to dissolve fronts, the front spearheading the breezes of the large lake is more fully developed. For the same rea...