Energy Balance and Heat Storage of Small Shallow Water Bodies in Semi-arid Areas

This research aims at developing a flexible and efficient (numerical) approach for estimating energy balance and heat storage of small shallow lakes in arid and semi-arid regions. To reach to this aim, some numerical methods and improvements in conventional methods were done. Optimizing the methods developed in this thesis is considered in order to reduce the computational work of solving time-dependent and complex heat exchange problems. The main aims of this research are as following:
1- to study the role and importance of small water reservoirs in (semi-)arid regions (case study: Upper East Region of Ghana);
2- to investigate effects of atmospheric stability conditions over small lakes in heat fluxes;
3- to use over-land measured values of air temperature to estimate unknown water surface temperature values which is needed for heat exchange estimation;
4- to calculate heat and mass transfer coefficients accurately by using a Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD)-based approach (CFDEvap Model);
5- to investigate temperature dynamcis as well as circulation in small water bodies to develop a comprehensive framework (Shallow Small Lake Framework: SSLF);
6- to study the small water surfaces and Atmospheric Boundary Layer (ABL) Interactions using CFD;