EGU23-1372, updated on 10 Jan 2024
https://doi.org/10.5194/egusphere-egu23-1372
EGU General Assembly 2023
© Author(s) 2024. This work is distributed under
the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License.

Estimating Freshwater Lens Volume based on Island Circularity

Lena Thissen, Janek Greskowiak, and Gudrun Massmann
Lena Thissen et al.
  • Carl von Ossietzky University of Oldenburg, Institute of Biology and Environmental Sciences (IBU), Hydrogeology and Landscape Hydrology, Germany (lena.thissen@uni-oldenburg.de)

Freshwater lenses (FWLs) are an important source of drinking water on many islands in the world. Thus, it is important to study their volumes. Many case studies have already been carried out on real world islands to approximate the FWL volume of the respective islands. Also, generic studies on FWLs exist that consider idealised island shapes such as circular or strip islands. However, to the authors’ knowledge there is no study so far that describes the general relationship between the island’s shape and the freshwater volume of its lens. Here we show that there is a relationship between these two quantities. In our approach, we characterized the shape of the islands using a circularity parameter; the volume was approximated using this shape and a simple numerical steady-state Ghyben-Herzberg approach. While we found a strong relationship between island shape and FWL volume, the relationship between the island shape and the depth of the FWL was less clear. The findings of this study can help to estimate the FWL volume on islands for which there are no case studies available.

How to cite: Thissen, L., Greskowiak, J., and Massmann, G.: Estimating Freshwater Lens Volume based on Island Circularity, EGU General Assembly 2023, Vienna, Austria, 23–28 Apr 2023, EGU23-1372, https://doi.org/10.5194/egusphere-egu23-1372, 2023.

Supplementary materials

Supplementary material file