Estimation of meteorological inputs for regional modeling of glacier melt

A challenge for regional modeling of snow and glacier melt is the specification of the driving meteorological variables, including air temperature and humidity. Progress has been made over the last decade in developing methods for regional interpolation of these variables from climate station networks for modeling seasonal snowmelt. However, these approaches cannot be directly used for modeling glacier melt because they do not account for the effects of glacier boundary layer processes. For example, air temperatures within a katabatic glacier boundary layer should be lower than those interpolated from a climate station network due to the cooling associated with sensible heat transfer to the glacier. We present preliminary analyses of meteorological data from two glaciers in the southern Coast Mountains, British Columbia, to demonstrate how simple elevation- based models can be used to remove the biases associated with using regional interpolations from climate networks to estimate temperature and vapour pressure within the glacier boundary layer.