Collaborative research: What role do glaciers play in terrestrial sub-arctic hydrology?

• Main Author: Seth Campbell
• Format: Dataset
• Language: unknown
• Published: Arctic Data Center 2017
• Subjects: ground-penetrating radar; GPR; snow accumulation; Alaska; mass balance; ice thickness; glacier; Arctic; Donnelly; Jarvis Glacier; Jarvis Creek; Collaborative research: What role do glaciers play in terrestrial sub-arctic hydrology?; glaciers; Ice; permafrost; Subarctic
• Online Access: https://doi.org/10.18739/A2542J90H

The overall project assessed the linkages and controls of a subarctic glacier-permafrost hydrological system from a watershed-scale perspective using field measurements, remote sensing and numerical modeling. Jarvis Creek (634km2), which feeds the Delta and Tanana River in Interior Alaska, was studied as a proxy of the observed mountain glacier melting and permafrost degradation that has been documented across the Arctic region in recent decades. The specific objectives were to 1) assess the hydrologic fluxes (including streamflow source components), stores, pathways and the role of glacier wastage on watershed hydrology, through hydrologic and geochemical field measurements as well as numerical and statistical modeling; 2) quantify the effect of glaciers and permafrost on recent historical (1960-present) hydrologic fluxes and storage by combining remote sensing, field measurements of glacier mass balance, and hydrology with a heat- and mass transfer model, and 3) project the future hydrologic regime using custom-derived downscaled climate projections. The purpose of this Ground-Penetrating Radar (GPR) data set was to 1) quantify winter snow accumulation hydrological contributions separately from the glacierized and non-glacierized regions of Jarvis Watershed; and, 2) estimate total glacier ice volume of Jarvis Glacier and, based on yearly mass balance calculations, estimate total future glacier contribution changes from Jarvis Glacier to hydrological discharge. Winter accumulation ranged between 1.1 to 1.9 m SWE during each of the three seasons. Jarvis Glacier ice volume calculated from geophysical surveys and a manually digitized glacier outline during late season 2015 was 1.16 km^3 within an area of 8.82 km^2.