Regional modelling of ablation in West Greenland

Regional assessment of water resources in West Greenland is needed in connection with planning future hydropower projects. Ablation from the Inland Ice and from local glaciers will be an important water source in most basins and a simple model for computing specific ablation has been developed. The...

Full description

Bibliographic Details
Main Author: Braithwaite, R.J.
Format: Article in Journal/Newspaper
Language:English
Published: 1980
Subjects:
Online Access:https://research.manchester.ac.uk/en/publications/f011e278-66ec-4a54-a06f-12c075ea3ee1
Description
Summary:Regional assessment of water resources in West Greenland is needed in connection with planning future hydropower projects. Ablation from the Inland Ice and from local glaciers will be an important water source in most basins and a simple model for computing specific ablation has been developed. The model uses air temperature extrapolated from coastal weather stations and will be combined with area data from the West Greenland glacier inventory to give estimates of runoff due to ablation for individual basins. The model is found to somewhat underestimate ablation at lower altitudes whilst greatly overestimating at higher altitudes and work will continue to improve the model. However, the present model applied to Nordbogletsher in Johan Dahl Land indicates that the standard deviation of the ablation is about a quarter of the long-term mean which suggests that runoff measurements would have to be made for many years at Nordbosø to obtain a reliable mean value for the runoff from the glacier.