In Hot Water! Using Numerical Analysis to show the Effects of Climate Change on the Great Lakes

Name: Molly Likins
Major: Mathematics
Advisors: Subhadip Chowdhury, Drew Pasteur (Second Reader)

Our Great Lakes have been suffering from the unstable weather since the 1950’s. The suffering is from climate change, which also affects the people who live in the Midwest. The Midwest heavily relies on the Great Lakes for their source of water and energy. In this study, we used Ordinary Differential Equations and numerical analyzation to show the drastic changes on the Great Lakes. We observed Lake Superior’s water temperatures and air temperatures over the years 1995-2010, by month. We dove into some hydrology ideas and all the different variables and coefficients used. We expanded many hydrology equations using a method of the Taylor series. Then we used the Fourth Order and Fehlberg Runge-Kutta method to numerically analyze the primary ODE we obtained from the Net Heat Equation. We applied the method to our datasets using Python coding. We described the effects of climate change on the Great Lakes. My interests are climate change and how we can be able to adapt to these changes. Although we know that climate change is a very real event that is happening in the world today. To create a successful plot, we would need is to change the step size and parameters accordingly and find a data set with a finer frequency, like one with daily temperature instead of average monthly.

Posted in Comments Enabled, Independent Study, Symposium 2022 on April 26, 2022.

One response to “In Hot Water! Using Numerical Analysis to show the Effects of Climate Change on the Great Lakes”

1. Rosemary n Horner says:

   April 29, 2022 at 5:23 pm

   Congrats Molly. Great job and good luck in you next chapter.