Mass Balance Sensitivity to Temperature Change for Globe Glaciers.
Abstract
Most of glaciers worldwide are shrinking under the global warming and contribute to the global sea level rise. Many researchers have tried to project glacier mass changes under several warming scenarios, they have calibrated their model and corrected biases of input meteorological data based on observed mass balance data. However, those observed glaciers are mainly located at Norway and Canada, and thus the future projection for glaciers situated at observation-scarce regions such as High Mountain Asia and South America may be speculative.
Here we estimate precipitation at median elevation averaged at each 0.5 degree grid using Randolph Glacier Inventory (version 6.0) by assuming zero mass balance at the elevation using ERA-Interim reanalysis data. We then calculated mass balance sensitivity to temperature change using the optimized precipitation in the same manner of Sakai and Fujita (2017). We find high correlation coefficient between glacier mass changes at 16 regions (Gardner et al., 2013) and the averaged mass balance sensitivity to temperature in the Northern Hemisphere. On the other hand, glaciers in the Southern Hemisphere have less correlation coefficient suggesting that the warming rate in the Southern Hemisphere could have been much less than that of the Northern Hemisphere.- Publication:
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AGU Fall Meeting Abstracts
- Pub Date:
- December 2018
- Bibcode:
- 2018AGUFM.C42A..03S
- Keywords:
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- 3309 Climatology;
- ATMOSPHERIC PROCESSESDE: 0720 Glaciers;
- CRYOSPHEREDE: 0736 Snow;
- CRYOSPHEREDE: 0744 Rivers;
- CRYOSPHERE