Surface Heat Budget estimation for Laurance Lake, US

Estimating heat budget factors are important to understand the many physical processes of large lakes and their reaction to the atmosphere. Some of these components are affected by water temperature, while the other depends on atmospheric conditions. This paper estimates the total heat flux for Lawrence lake via a code developed in MATLAB environment. The code can deal with different time resolutions if the lake water surface temperature data were at different time resolutions from the meteorological data. Results showed that solar energy peaks at 842 Watt/m2 at 540 Julian day, which is very normal for a sunny summer day, while the longwave radiation has 204 Watt/m2 as a min value. The back radiation did not make any reaction for the variation, but it revealed a small gradient. Furthermore, evaporation recorded - 67 Watt/m2 as a minimum value at 659 Julian day and 360 Watt/m2 as a maximum value at 578.43 Julian day close to the maximum water surface temperature event.