Drivers of Circulation Patterns in Colour Lake, Nunavut

The thermal cycling of lakes is crucial to all aquatic life, greatly influencing primary productivity through the distribution of heat, nutrients, dissolved oxygen and suspended sediments (Liu et al., 2024). The high Arctic region of Canada contains large amounts of lakes covered in ice for up to ten months a year. Logistical and technical difficulties have made year-round monitoring of these lakes difficult, creating a gap in the literature. Quantifying circulation patterns can be done by monitoring conductivity and temperature as they demonstrate how the water is being moved around and stratified. Based on the premise of identifying conductivity and temperature variances in lakes, this study will look to answer how wind, air temperature, solar radiation, and snow depth influence circulation patterns in a representative high Arctic Lake, Colour Lake on Axel Heiberg Island, and what the dominant factors affecting circulation patterns are. The environmental and lake data were collected at fifteen-minute intervals over two years. Wavelet analysis will be used to compare periodicity and phases of the time series data from the lake and environmental variables. Finally, lake surface imagery will then be compared with the results of the wavelet analysis to determine what is going on when the lake is affected by environmental variables and what is going on when it isn’t. Understanding the drivers of lake circulation patterns is critical in our knowledge of northern systems and how climate change may affect them down the road.