Modeling Lake Titicaca Daily and Monthly Evaporation

Abstract

Abstract. Lake Titicaca is an important water ecosystem of South America. Due to uncertainties in estimating the evaporation losses from the lake, surface water storage calculations are uncertain. In this paper, we try to improve evaporation loss estimations by comparing different methods to calculate daily and monthly evaporation from Lake Titicaca. These were: water balance, heat balance, mass transfer method, and the Penman equation. The evaporation was computed at daily time step and compared with estimated evaporation using mean monthly meteorological observations. We found that the most reliable method of determining the annual lake evaporation is using the heat balance approach. To estimate the monthly lake evaporation using heat balance, the heat storage changes must be known in advance. Since convection from the surface layer is intense during nights resulting in a well-mixed top layer every morning, it is possible to determine the change of heat storage from the measured morning surface temperature. The mean annual lake evaporation was found to be 1700 mm. Monthly evaporation computed using daily data and monthly means resulted in minor differences.