Spatio-temporal reconstruction of winter glacier mass balance in the Alps, Scandinavia, Central Asia and western Canada (1981-2019) using climate reanalyses and machine learning ...

• Main Authors: Guidicelli, Matteo, Huss, Matthias, Gabella, Marco, Salzmann, Nadine
• Format: Article in Journal/Newspaper
• Language: English
• Published: ETH Zurich 2023
• Subjects: glacier*
• Online Access: https://dx.doi.org/10.3929/ethz-b-000603056; http://hdl.handle.net/20.500.11850/603056

Spatio-temporal reconstruction of winter glacier mass balance is important for assessing long-term impacts of climate change. However, high-altitude regions significantly lack reliable observations, which is limiting the calibration of glaciological and hydrological models. Reanalysis products provide estimates of snow precipitation also for remote high-mountain regions, but this data come with inherent uncertainty, and assessing their biases is difficult given the low quantity and quality of available (long-term) in situ observations. In this study, we aim at improving knowledge on the spatio-temporal variations in winter glacier mass balance by exploring the combination of data from reanalyses and direct snow accumulation observations on glaciers using machine learning. We use the winter mass balance data of 95 glaciers distributed over the European Alps, western Canada, Central Asia and Scandinavia and compare them with the total precipitation from the ERA5 and the MERRA-2 reanalysis products during the ... : The Cryosphere, 17 (2) ...