A New Sea Ice Concentration Climate Data Record for Tracking Arctic and Antarctic Variability and Change
Abstract
The paucity of reliable climate data is one of the major barriers to a better understanding of meteorological processes that drive glacier mass balance variability in High Asia. To address this problem, a new high-resolution atmospheric dataset, the High Asia Reanalysis (HAR), was generated by dynamical downscaling of gridded observations using the Weather Research and Forecast model for the period of 2001-2012. With a spatial resolution of 10 km, it covers most parts of the Tibetan Plateau and the Himalaya and Karakoram/Pamir ranges. The strength of this approach is that glaciated elevations are represented explicitly in the model, allowing unprecedented process-based studies of mass-balance variability at the local and regional scales. In this presentation, we describe the dataset with an emphasis on precipitation patterns and variability. We also present the results of a case study at Zhadang Glacier in the south-central Tibetan Plateau, by coupling a physically-based mass-balance (MB) model to the HAR data. This application reveals that mid-latitude climate dynamics have a significant influence on glacier MB fluctuations, which has not yet been quantified in the monsoonal zone of High Asia. Such insights into the climatic drivers of mass balance in High Asia are vital to better assess both past and future regional glacier evolution. A cluster analysis of seasonal precipitation exhibits five major glacier accumulation regimes in High Asia. This contextualizes the climatic drivers mentioned above and identify forthcoming research questions for regions where these links might operate differently.
- Publication:
-
AGU Fall Meeting Abstracts
- Pub Date:
- December 2011
- Bibcode:
- 2011AGUFM.C14A..03M
- Keywords:
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- 0750 CRYOSPHERE / Sea ice;
- 0758 CRYOSPHERE / Remote sensing;
- 1621 GLOBAL CHANGE / Cryospheric change;
- 1946 INFORMATICS / Metadata;
- 0720 CRYOSPHERE Glaciers;
- 0762 CRYOSPHERE Mass balance 0764 Energy balance;
- 3355 ATMOSPHERIC PROCESSES Regional modeling;
- 3305 ATMOSPHERIC PROCESSES Climate change and variability