Drainage of an ice-dammed lake through a supraglacial stream: hydraulics and thermodynamics - Data Collection
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Date
2021-10-26Type
- Data Collection
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Abstract
The glacier-dammed Lac des Faverges, located on Glacier de la Plaine Morte (Swiss Alps), drained annually as a glacier lakeoutburst flood since 2011. In 2018, the lake volume reached more than 2 millions cubic meter and the resulting flood caused damages to the infrastructure downstream. In 2019, a supraglacial channel was dug to artificially initiate a surface lake drainage, thus limiting the lake water volume and the corresponding hazard. The peak in lake discharge was successfully reduced by over 90% compared to 2018. We conducted extensive field measurements of the lake-channel system during the 48-days drainage event of 2019 to characterize its hydraulics and thermodynamics. The derived Darcy-Weisbach friction factor, which characterizes the water flow resistance in the channel, ranges from 0.17 to 0.48. This broad range emphasizes the factor’s variability, and questions the choice of a constant friction factor in glacio-hydrological models. For the Nusselt number, which relates the channel-wall melt to the water temperature, we show that the classic, empirical Dittus-Boelter equation with the standard coefficients is not adequately representing our measurements, and we propose a suitable pair of coefficients to fit our observations.This hints at the need to continue the research into how heat transfer at the ice/water interface is described in the context of glacial hydraulics. Show more
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https://doi.org/10.3929/ethz-b-000504956Contributors
Contact person: Ogier, Christophe
Project member: Werder, Mauro
Project member: Ogier, Christophe
Project member: Huss, Matthias
Project member: Farinotti, Daniel
Publisher
ETH ZurichDate created
2019-07-01/2021-09-09Subject
Glaciology; Hydraulics; Thermodynamics; glacial lake outburst floodOrganisational unit
09599 - Farinotti, Daniel / Farinotti, Daniel
Related publications and datasets
Is supplement to: https://doi.org/10.3929/ethz-b-000515810
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