Figure 8: Daily mean latent heat flux for 2019 (light blue), 2020 (purple) and 2021 (blue), illustrating the occurrence of condensation episodes between 13 and 30 June.
The reservoir was exposed to many episodes of sustained evaporation, defined as consecutive 24-h periods with a daily mean LE ≥ 100 W m−2 (i.e., daily mean LE ≥ 3.5 mm), ranging from one to several days. Of those, the most modest episode caused 3.5 mm of evaporation in one day (obviously), while the largest episode caused 29.3 mm of evaporation in 6 days (≈5 mm day–1). Figure 9 presents the number of sustained evaporation events for each month and their durations. Most events were of short duration but had high evaporation rates: 80% of events lasted 2 days or less. The mean rate of evaporation was 0.2 mm h–1 for all events. As a comparison, Blanken et al. (2011) reported that most of the evaporation from Lake Superior occurred in 2.5- to 3-day episodic pulses.