Assessment of the water storage potential at Lake Mjölhatteträsk on Storsudret, Gotland

Sammanfattning: During the recent summers, Gotland has suffered from drinking water shortage and due to the climate change, the water shortage can possible increase in the future. To find a solution, the Swedish Environmental Research Institute IVL and Region Gotland are going to build a testbed at Storsudret located on the south of Gotland, to investigate different sustainable solutions. One possible solution is to increase the water level in Lake Mjölhatteträsk, located at Storsudret, to increase the water storage. This master thesis has focused on the water balance of the lake to understand whether it is possible to store more water in the lake and how large areas that would be flooded in the event of an increase in the water level. This has been done using a combination of field data sampling with geophysical methods, hydraulic tests, water depth measurements, existing hydrometeorological data from Lantmäteriet and the Geological Survey of Sweden (SGU) and modelling with the tools MIKE SHE and MIKE HYDRO River created by DHI and also GIS. The result of this master thesis showed that there is a very thin soil layer with possibly high clay and silt content to the west of the lake. At the bottom of the lake, a thick clay layer exists which reduces the hydraulic connection between the lake and the surroundings. The potential to store and extract water in the sand layer in the west is therefore small. However, there is potential to produce enough water in the lake to meet the water demand at Storsudret, according to the model created in MIKE SHE. This would require a dam at a suggested location at the outflow with a height of 0.12 m.