A practical approach to predict the duration of the growing season for European lakes

This work presents the first practically useful models to estimate the duration of the growing season (GS in days) for European lakes. GS is a fundamental parameter in limnology, where it is used, e.g., to calculate lake characteristic annual primary production (in g ww/m²·yr) from measurement data in g C/l·day. We have presented two simple empirical regression equations where GS is estimated from latitude. We have also introduced a more comprehensive model. It is derived from a previously presented well calibrated and validated model predicting lake epilimnetic temperatures from readily available data on latitude, altitude, continentality (distance from the Sea) and lake volume. Operationally, the duration of the growing season (GS in days) is defined from the predicted number of days when epilimentic water temperatures are higher than 9°C. The two modelling approaches are based on different presuppositions and they have been derived and tested from different data-sets. A model comparison has shown that the overall correspondence in predicted GS-values between the methods is very good. Evidently, the more comprehensive model can provide more relevant GS-predictions for many lakes since it also accounts for differences among lakes in altitude, continentality and volume.