Lake Mead and Lake Mohave Evaporation Trends

The Bureau of Reclamation recently completed an energy balance update to their reservoir evaporation coefficients. The new methodology replaces the historical coefficients which were derived from evaporation plan coefficients. The new eddy covariance based coefficients provided a drastic change to the evaporation that was thought to occur at both reservoirs. This study will analyze the hourly and seasonal evaporation data that was collected by the USGS and BOR between 2010 and 2019. This study aims to analyze trends in evaporation over time and as conditions changed at each reservoir. There is also a potential to analyze the impact of a warming climate on reservoir evaporation. Modeled evaporation will also be one of the over-arching goals of this study.