Studies on water movements and sediments in Southern Lake Michigan : part 1[-3] ... / by John C. Ayers.

mixing mechanisms among which waves, currents, and internal
waves appear to be dominant, and to which are added local or
periodic sinkings, upwellings, surface seiches, and periods of
overturning. As a result of these turbulent phenomena inflowing
waters more or less quickly lose their identity by being mixed
into the receiving water.
Outflow sites are generally at distance from sites of inflow. In general, outflowing waters consist of more or less
homogeneous mixtures of inflow and receiving water. Outflows
balance the volume-content budget of a lake or basin. It is
done, however, by removing compensatory volumes of "mixed"
waters, not of "pure" receiving water.
Because influent waters become mixed with the receiving
water, and because outflows are of mixed water, the flushing-out
of the water that fills a lake or basin at a given instant is an
exponential "die-away" process in which the rate of removal of
original water at any time after the given instant is dependent
upon the proportion of the original water mass that is still
present.
The U. S. Geological Survey Water Supply Papers give the
mean annual runoff of the rivers tributary to the lower basin of
Lake Michigan as 4.2 x 10 cubic feet, or about 14,000 cubic
feet per second through the year.
Maximum net transport over the sill into the southern basin
of the lake, in this study, is about 47,000 m3/sec or 1.65 x 106
cfs.
The sum of river and over-the-sill inflows under these

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