Water temperature is crucial for ecosystems and society, and is strongly driven by climate, environmental and human factors. Extreme water temperatures can severely impact these systems by altering biological functioning (e.g. increasing fish mortality) or limiting the usefulness to humans (e.g. cooling water use and power generation potentials). Water temperature is also used as a tracer for hydrological processes, enabling us to understand contributions of different hydrological components to runoff generation.
This session aims to bring together freshwater temperature researchers from both the surface (i.e. springs, rivers, streams, lakes and reservoirs) and subsurface waters (i.e. soil and groundwater) community. It aims to shed light on the natural and anthropogenic processes governing fresh water temperatures, and the resulting implications for ecosystem health, water resources management and sectoral uses. We are interested in spatio-temporal patterns and historic or future trends of water temperature and its extremes, their impact on aquatic biochemistry and ecosystems, as well as different types of water temperature modelling approaches (e.g. process-based, machine learning).
We welcome submissions that investigate water temperature dynamics across various temporal and spatial scales (local to global) in any inland water bodies using field and lab experiments, large-scale and -sample analyses, and modelling approaches.