The Laurentian Great Lakes are the world’s largest freshwater system and regulate the climate of the Great Lakes region. The region has been increasingly experiencing climatic, hydrological, and ecological changes. Thus, an accurate mechanistic representation of the Great Lakes' thermal structure in Regional Climate Models (RCMs) is critical to studying the climate of this region. However, most RCMs represent the Great Lakes through coupled one-dimensional (1D) column lake models, which work well for small inland lakes but are unable to resolve the realistic hydrodynamics of the Great Lakes, especially the large and deep lakes. This model deficit leads to inaccurate representations of lake surface temperature that can affect both local and nonlocal climate and weather patterns (Wang et al. 2021). This presentation evaluates a long-term climate dataset using the first-of-its-kind, fully coupled modeling system using the Weather Research and Forecasting (WRF) model and a three-dimensional (3D) hydrodynamic model (Kayastha et al. 2023; 2024). Model results are being compared to a wide variety of observational and reanalysis data products, demonstrating the unique skill of the coupled 3D modeling system in reproducing climate trends, variability, and extremes in the Great Lakes Basin, and capturing the physical characteristics of the Great Lakes by fully resolving the lake hydrodynamics. The model also couples with a multi-layer urban canopy model, allowing the study of coastal urban processes and interactions between urban and waterbodies over the model domain (Wang et al. 2023).

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