Geometric Shape, Water Availability and Under Ice Volume of Alberta Lakes

Water availability information can be vital to the execution of informed management decisions. Since only a small fraction of Alberta lakes have surveyed bathymetry data, accurate estimation of lake water availability is often challenging. In this study, we analysed available bathymetry data from 77 lakes, distributed over six major river basins and five natural regions of Alberta, and developed dimensionless relationships between volume and depth. We compared these relationships with the analytical relationship between volume and depth for five idealized lake shapes, viz. as cylindrical, pseudo-parabolic, parabolic, conic, and inverse-parabolic. Our study shows that considering the volume-depth relationship, 48% of Alberta lakes fall under parabolic shape, 29% fall under conic shape, and the rest (23%) fall under either pseudo-parabolic, inverse-parabolic, or cylindrical shape. We also developed four different models to estimate maximum lake volume (a proxy of lake water availability) and 5% under ice volume (a proxy for winter allocation limit of lake water) assuming an ice thickness of 80 cm. These models have been developed in such a way that allows the user to apply the models based on data availability and can be used in absence of site-specific data (e.g., bathymetry) to estimate volume, and subsequently water availability in lakes. Finally, we propose a formulation of percent volume reduction due to small water withdrawal, which requires only maximum depth of a lake in order to estimate a potential volume reduction limit for a water withdrawal.The accepted manuscript in pdf format is listed with the files at the bottom of this page. The presentation of the authors' names and (or) special characters in the title of the manuscript may differ slightly between what is listed on this page and what is listed in the pdf file of the accepted manuscript; that in the pdf file of the accepted manuscript is what was submitted by the author