| Summary: | Thesis (M.S.) University of Alaska Fairbanks, 2016 Mass loss from glaciers in Southeast Alaska is expected to alter downstream environmental conditions such as streamflow patterns, riverine and coastal ecological systems, and ocean properties. To investigate these potential changes under future climate scenarios, accurate climate data are needed to drive glacier mass balance models. However, assessing and modeling precipitation in mountainous regions remains a major challenge in glacier mass balance modeling. We have used a linear theory of orographic precipitation model (LT model) to downscale precipitation from both the Weather Research and Forecasting (WRF) model and the European Centre for Medium-RangeWeather Forecasts interim reanalysis (ERA-Interim) to the Juneau Icefield, one of the largest icefields in North America (4149 km2), over the period 1979--2013. The LT model is physically-based, combining airflow dynamics and simple cloud microphysics to simulate precipitation in complex terrain. Cloud microphysics is parameterized as a function of user-defined snow and rain fall speeds which are then used to calculate the cloud time delay, t, at every time step. We established a model reference run using literature values of snow fall speed and rain fall speed. The model was run using a 1 km digital elevation model and 6 hour timesteps. Due to a lack of precipitation observations, we validated the model with point net accumulation observations along an 8.5 km transect on Taku glacier, one of the largest and best-studied outlet glaciers of the icefield. The observations occurred in late July of 1998, 2004, 2005, 2010, and 2011. We extracted the snow portion from the modeled precipitation and accounted for melt using a temperature-index model prior to comparing results to the observations. The latter was necessary since the observations were taken when substantial melt of the winter snow cover had occurred. The results of the reference run show reasonable agreement with the available glaciological observations ...
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