Differential cooling drives large‐scale convective circulation in Lake Tanganyika

Field data, scaling analysis, and three-dimensional numerical experiments demonstrate that the dominant large-scale circulation pattern during the southeast trade winds in Lake Tanganyika (East Africa) is a downwind flow in the metalimnion, with a returning southward upwind flow in the upper region of the epilimnion. This is in the opposite direction to all prior literature available on the lake, which has assumed that the southeast trade winds must drive a northward surface flow due to momentum induced by the wind. The gradient in wind speed and humidity along the length of the lake and the resulting gradient in heat exchange with the atmosphere result in warm water accumulating at the northern end of the lake. The north basin of Lake Tanganyika, thus, acts as a heat sink while the south basin is a net source of heat to the atmosphere. The resulting variation in buoyancy flux is strong enough to drive a convective flow in the upper layer in the opposite direction to the wind. A large-scale convective circulation results in an annual exchange of 6.2 × 1012 m3 of water and an annual net transport of heat (averaging 0.2 terawatt) from the northern to the southern region of the lake. Currents in the upper 100-m layer, with a mean flow of 0.2 Sverdrup and flow speed of 0.08 m s−1, can be described by the superposition of a parallel convective flow with the internal seiche motion.