Glacial mass balance changes in the Karakoramand Himalaya based on CMIP5 multi-model

climate projections

Climate Change, Jan 2014

Rajiv K. Chaturvedi & Anil Kulkarni &Yogesh Karyakarte & Jaideep Joshi & G. Bala

Presented by: Shaunak De

Introduction

• Karakoram and Himalaya (KH) cover an area of about 40,800 km2

• Provide water resources to about 800 million people in Asia

• Little is known about the susceptibility to ongoing climate change

• Study assesses impact on climate change on Karakoram Glacier

Study Area

Dataset Used

• Observed climate data are obtained from Climate Research Unit (CRU; CRU TS3.10) University of East Anglia (Mitchell and Jones 2005).

• Future temperature and precipitationprojectionsare obtained from ensemble-mean projections for the KH region from 21 Earth system models

• Available under the coupled model inter-comparison project (CMIP5;Moss et al. 2010; Chaturvedi et al. 2012).

Methodology

Results

Key References

• Bahr DB, Dyurgerov M,MeierMF (2009) Sea-level rise from glaciers and ice caps: a lower bound. Geophys Res Lett 36, L03501

• Radic V, Bliss A, Beedlow AC, Hock R, Miles E, Cogley JG (2013) Regional and global projections of twentyfirst century glacier mass changes in response to climate scenarios from global climate models. Clim Dyn 1– 22, doi:10.1007/s00382-013-1719-7 - RathoreBP, Kulkarni AV, Sherasia NK (2009)

• Ignéczi Á, Nagy B (2013) Determining steady-state accumulation-area ratios of outlet glaciers for application of outlets in climate reconstructions. Quat Int 293:268–274

• Dyurgerov M, Meier MF, Bahr DB (2009) A new index of glacier area change: a tool for glacier monitoring. J Glaciol 55:710–716