Negligible Impact on Precipitation From a Permanent Inland Lake in Central Australia

Abstract

For over a century, numerous proposals for increasing available water in central Australia have been raised, inspired in part by the natural occurrence of the ephemeral lake, Kati Thanda-Lake Eyre. It has also been proposed that additional rainfall generated by the lake would spread beyond the lake itself, potentially opening up large tracts of uncultivated land to dryland agriculture. Here we use a climate model to examine how adding a permanent lake to Australia's arid center might influence local and regional precipitation. Locally, evaporative cooling from the lake increases low-level divergence, suppressing precipitation. Regionally, additional moisture from the lake is spread thinly over the Australian continent, resulting in little change to total precipitation. Overall, our results do not support the assertion that maintaining a large inland lake like Kati Thanda-Lake Eyre in central Australia would significantly increase precipitation, either locally or regionally.