Modeling of the Perito Moreno glacier damming events and water balance of Rico branch (Lake Argentino) based on remote sensing and in situ data

Located in a mountainous area Lake Argentino is one of the biggest water bodies in South America. It's a tourist attraction well-known worldwide for extreme ice damming events due to the presence of the Perito Moreno glacier splitting the southernmost branch, known as Rico branch, from the main body of the Lake Argentino. In the present study our objective is to investigate if the water can be accumulated during damming not only by excess of precipitations but also by the accumulation process due to the closed passage between Rico and the main water body of Lake Argentino. This is achieved by establishing a simple model which estimates short term evolutions of Rico water balance. With our model we simulate Rico 2004, 2006, 2008 damming events for which altimetry data are available, theirs hydrological regimes and the amount of incoming and outgoing water to provide plausible explanation. Our simulations explain almost 100% of water present in the Rico system during each damming. Thus, by so doing this we can affirm that the damming of water can be driven not only by simple excess of inputs but also by closure of the passage between Rico branch and Lake Argentino. Moreover, by combining different remote sensing and in situ data we establish the hypsometry of Rico branch. We prove the existence of a small permanent flux of water between both parts of the lake and the possibility of the damming formation detection in in situ (or altimetry) measurements. Although very narrow size of Rico branch, the altimetry data processing from Envisat mission can provide time series of lake surface heights over both parts. Coupled with optical Landsat imaging, those results give possibility to evaluate only by remote sensing approach approximate water storage during ice damming events. Until now Envisat was the only mission which gave exploitable data over Rico, but recent scientific missions such as Cryosat-2 and AltiKa give new opportunities to study lakes water balance, and upcoming missions as Jason-3, Sentinel 3A and Sentinel 3B or SWOT will help to improve again the data quality and altimetry coverage.