Scientific Results

This catalogue is obtained by conducting a systematic literature review of scientific studies and reviews related to monitoring, forecasting, and simulating the inland water cycle. The analysis maps scientific expertise across research groups and classifies findings by the type of inland water studied, application focus, and geographical scope. A gap analysis will identify missing research areas and assess their relevance to policymaking.

ID â–Č Type Year Authors Title Venue/Journal DOI Research type Water System Technical Focus Abstract Link with Projects Link with Tools Related policies ID
publications-1751 Peer reviewed articles 2024 GarcĂ­a GĂłmez, Sergio C., Alan A. Myers, Eleni Avramidi, Kleopatra Grammatiki, Mysini Lymperaki, Vasilis Resaikos, Magdalene Papatheodoulou, Vasilis Louca, Dimitrios Xevgenos, Frithjof C. KĂŒpper A new species of Pontocrates Boeck, 1871 (Crustacea, Amphipoda, Oedicerotidae) from Cyprus Zootaxa 10.11646/zootaxa.5474.1.5 Uncategorized Natural Water Bodies A new species of the amphipod genus Pontocrates (Boeck 1871), family Oedicerotidae, is described from Cyprus in the south-eastern Mediterranean Sea. It is a sister taxon to Pontocrates moorei (Myers & Ashelby 2022), currently recorded solely from the British Isles. It is the third species of Pontocrates now known to occur in the Mediterranean Sea.   869474
publications-1752 Peer reviewed articles 2021 Evan Miles, Michael McCarthy, Amaury Dehecq, Marin Kneib, Stefan Fugger, Francesca Pellicciotti Health and sustainability of glaciers in High Mountain Asia Nature Communications 10.1038/s41467-021-23073-4 Hydrological modeling Hydropower Dams & reservoirs AbstractGlaciers in High Mountain Asia generate meltwater that supports the water needs of 250 million people, but current knowledge of annual accumulation and ablation is limited to sparse field measurements biased in location and glacier size. Here, we present altitudinally-resolved specific mass balances (surface, internal, and basal combined) for 5527 glaciers in High Mountain Asia for 2000–2016, derived by correcting observed glacier thinning patterns for mass redistribution due to ice flow. We find that 41% of glaciers accumulated mass over less than 20% of their area, and only 60% ± 10% of regional annual ablation was compensated by accumulation. Even without 21stcentury warming, 21% ± 1% of ice volume will be lost by 2100 due to current climatic-geometric imbalance, representing a reduction in glacier ablation into rivers of 28% ± 1%. The ablation of glaciers in the Himalayas and Tien Shan was mostly unsustainable and ice volume in these regions will reduce by at least 30% by 2100. The most important and vulnerable glacier-fed river basins (Amu Darya, Indus, Syr Darya, Tarim Interior) were supplied with >50% sustainable glacier ablation but will see long-term reductions in ice mass and glacier meltwater supply regardless of the Karakoram Anomaly. 772751
publications-1753 Peer reviewed articles 2022 Fugger S, Fyffe CL, Fatichi S, Miles E, McCarthy M, Shaw TE, Ding B, Yang W, Wagnon P, Immerzeel W, Liu Q, Pellicciotti F Understanding monsoon controls on the energy and mass balance of glaciers in the Central and Eastern Himalaya The Cryosphere 10.5194/tc-16-1631-2022 Simulation & Modeling Hydropower Dams & reservoirs Abstract. The Indian and East Asian summer monsoons shape the melt and accumulation patterns of glaciers in High Mountain Asia in complex ways due to the interaction of persistent cloud cover, large temperature ranges, high atmospheric water content and high precipitation rates. Glacier energy- and mass-balance modelling using in situ measurements offers insights into the ways in which surface processes are shaped by climatic regimes. In this study, we use a full energy- and mass-balance model and seven on-glacier automatic weather station datasets from different parts of the Central and Eastern Himalaya to investigate how monsoon conditions influence the glacier surface energy and mass balance. In particular, we look at how debris-covered and debris-free glaciers respond differently to monsoonal conditions. The radiation budget primarily controls the melt of clean-ice glaciers, but turbulent fluxes play an important role in modulating the melt energy on debris-covered glaciers. The sensible heat flux decreases during core monsoon, but the latent heat flux cools the surface due to evaporation of liquid water. This interplay of radiative and turbulent fluxes causes debris-covered glacier melt rates to stay almost constant through the different phases of the monsoon. Ice melt under thin debris, on the other hand, is amplified by both the dark surface and the turbulent fluxes, which intensify melt during monsoon through surface heating and condensation. Pre-monsoon snow cover can considerably delay melt onset and have a strong impact on the seasonal mass balance. Intermittent monsoon snow cover lowers the melt rates at high elevation. This work is fundamental to the understanding of the present and future Himalayan cryosphere and water budget, while informing and motivating further glacier- and catchment-scale research using process-based models. 772751
publications-1754 Peer reviewed articles 2024 Pascal Buri; Simone Fatichi; Thomas E. Shaw; Catriona L. Fyffe; Evan S. Miles; Michael J. McCarthy; Marin Kneib; Shaoting Ren; Achille Jouberton; Stefan Fugger; Li Jia; Jing Zhang; Cong Shen; Chaolei Zheng; Massimo Menenti; Francesca Pellicciotti Land surface modeling informed by earth observation data: toward understanding blue–green–white water fluxes in High Mountain Asia Geo-Spatial Information Science 10.1080/10095020.2024.2330546 Hydrological modeling Precipitation & Ecological Systems No abstract available 772751
publications-1755 Peer reviewed articles 2021 Kneib M, Miles E, Buri P, Molnar P, McCarthy M, Fugger S, Pellicciotti F Interannual dynamics of ice cliff populations on debris-covered glaciers from remote sensing observations and stochastic modeling Journal of Geophysical Research: Earth Surface 10.1029/2021jf006179 Simulation & Modeling Hydropower Dams & reservoirs AbstractIce cliffs are common on debris‐covered glaciers and have relatively high melt rates due to their direct exposure to incoming radiation. Previous studies have shown that their number and relative area can change considerably from year to year, but this variability has not been explored, in part because available cliff observations are irregular. Here, we systematically mapped and tracked ice cliffs across four debris‐covered glaciers in High Mountain Asia for every late ablation season from 2009 to 2019 using high‐resolution multi‐spectral satellite imagery. We then quantified the processes occurring at the feature scale to train a stochastic birth‐death model to represent the cliff population dynamics. Our results show that while the cliff relative area can change by up to 20% from year to year, the natural long‐term variability is constrained, thus defining a glacier‐specific cliff carrying capacity. In a subsequent step, the inclusion of external drivers related to climate, glacier dynamics, and hydrology highlights the influence of these variables on the cliff population dynamics, which is usually not a direct one due to the complexity and interdependence of the processes taking place at the glacier surface. In some extreme cases (here, a glacier surge), these external drivers may lead to a reorganization of the cliffs at the glacier surface and a change in the natural variability. These results have implications for the melt of debris‐covered glaciers, in addition to showing the high rate of changes at their surface and highlighting some of the links between cliff population and glacier state. 772751
publications-1756 Peer reviewed articles 2021 Thomas E. Shaw, Wei Yang, Álvaro Ayala, Claudio Bravo, Chuanxi Zhao, Francesca Pellicciotti Distributed summer air temperatures across mountain glaciers in the south-east Tibetan Plateau: temperature sensitivity and comparison with existing glacier datasets The Cryosphere 10.5194/tc-15-595-2021 AI & Machine Learning Wastewater Treatment Plants Abstract. Near-surface air temperature (Ta) is highly important for modelling glacier ablation, though its spatio-temporal variability over melting glaciers still remains largely unknown. We present a new dataset of distributed Ta for three glaciers of different size in the south-east Tibetan Plateau during two monsoon-dominated summer seasons. We compare on-glacier Ta to ambient Ta extrapolated from several local off-glacier stations. We parameterise the along-flowline sensitivity of Ta on these glaciers to changes in off-glacier temperatures (referred to as “temperature sensitivity”) and present the results in the context of available distributed on-glacier datasets around the world. Temperature sensitivity decreases rapidly up to 2000–3000 m along the down-glacier flowline distance. Beyond this distance, both the Ta on the Tibetan glaciers and global glacier datasets show little additional cooling relative to the off-glacier temperature. In general, Ta on small glaciers (with flowline distances <1000 m) is highly sensitive to temperature changes outside the glacier boundary layer. The climatology of a given region can influence the general magnitude of this temperature sensitivity, though no strong relationships are found between along-flowline temperature sensitivity and mean summer temperatures or precipitation. The terminus of some glaciers is affected by other warm-air processes that increase temperature sensitivity (such as divergent boundary layer flow, warm up-valley winds or debris/valley heating effects) which are evident only beyond ∌70 % of the total glacier flowline distance. Our results therefore suggest a strong role of local effects in modulating temperature sensitivity close to the glacier terminus, although further work is still required to explain the variability of these effects for different glaciers. 772751
publications-1757 Peer reviewed articles 2020 Wei Yang, Chuanxi Zhao, Matthew Westoby, Tandong Yao, Yongjie Wang, Francesca Pellicciotti, Jianmin Zhou, Zhen He, Evan Miles Seasonal Dynamics of a Temperate Tibetan Glacier Revealed by High-Resolution UAV Photogrammetry and In Situ Measurements Remote Sensing 10.3390/rs12152389 Simulation & Modeling Wastewater Treatment Plants The seasonal dynamic changes of Tibetan glaciers have seen little prior investigation, despite the increase in geodetic studies of multi-year changes. This study compares seasonal glacier dynamics (“cold” and “warm” seasons) in the ablation zone of Parlung No. 4 Glacier, a temperate glacier in the monsoon-influenced southeastern Tibetan Plateau, by using repeat unpiloted aerial vehicle (UAV) surveys combined with Structure-from-Motion (SfM) photogrammetry and ground stake measurements. Our results showed that the surveyed ablation zone had a mean change of −2.7 m of ice surface elevation during the period of September 2018 to October 2019 but is characterized by significant seasonal cyclic variations with ice surface elevation lifting (+2.0 m) in the cold season (September 2018 to June 2019) but lowering (−4.7 m) in the warm season (June 2019 to October 2019). Over an annual timescale, surface lowering was greatly suppressed by the resupply of ice from the glacier’s accumulation area—the annual emergence velocity compensates for about 55% of surface ablation in our study area. Cold season emergence velocities (3.0 ± 1.2 m) were ~5-times larger than those observed in the warm season (0.6 ± 1.0 m). Distinct spring precipitation patterns may contribute to these distinct seasonal signals. Such seasonal dynamic conditions are possibly critical for different glacier responses to climate change in this region of the Tibetan Plateau, and perhaps further afield. 772751
publications-1758 Peer reviewed articles 2023 Salerno, F., Guyennon, N., Yang, K., Thomas Shaw, Lin, C., Colombo, N., 
, Evan Miles, Pellicciotti, F. Local cooling and drying induced by Himalayan glaciers under global warming Nature Geoscience 10.1038/s41561-023-01331-y Uncategorized Groundwater AbstractUnderstanding the response of Himalayan glaciers to global warming is vital because of their role as a water source for the Asian subcontinent. However, great uncertainties still exist on the climate drivers of past and present glacier changes across scales. Here, we analyse continuous hourly climate station data from a glacierized elevation (Pyramid station, Mount Everest) since 1994 together with other ground observations and climate reanalysis. We show that a decrease in maximum air temperature and precipitation occurred during the last three decades at Pyramid in response to global warming. Reanalysis data suggest a broader occurrence of this effect in the glacierized areas of the Himalaya. We hypothesize that the counterintuitive cooling is caused by enhanced sensible heat exchange and the associated increase in glacier katabatic wind, which draws cool air downward from higher elevations. The stronger katabatic winds have also lowered the elevation of local wind convergence, thereby diminishing precipitation in glacial areas and negatively affecting glacier mass balance. This local cooling may have partially preserved glaciers from melting and could help protect the periglacial environment. 772751
publications-1759 Peer reviewed articles 2018 Sam Herreid, Francesca Pellicciotti Automated detection of ice cliffs within supraglacial debris cover The Cryosphere 10.5194/tc-12-1811-2018 Uncategorized Precipitation & Ecological Systems Abstract. Ice cliffs within a supraglacial debris cover have been identified as a source for high ablation relative to the surrounding debris-covered area. Due to their small relative size and steep orientation, ice cliffs are difficult to detect using nadir-looking space borne sensors. The method presented here uses surface slopes calculated from digital elevation model (DEM) data to map ice cliff geometry and produce an ice cliff probability map. Surface slope thresholds, which can be sensitive to geographic location and/or data quality, are selected automatically. The method also attempts to include area at the (often narrowing) ends of ice cliffs which could otherwise be neglected due to signal saturation in surface slope data. The method was calibrated in the eastern Alaska Range, Alaska, USA, against a control ice cliff dataset derived from high-resolution visible and thermal data. Using the same input parameter set that performed best in Alaska, the method was tested against ice cliffs manually mapped in the Khumbu Himal, Nepal. Our results suggest the method can accommodate different glaciological settings and different DEM data sources without a data intensive (high-resolution, multi-data source) recalibration. 772751
publications-1760 Peer reviewed articles 2023 Zhao, C., Yang, W., Miles, E., Westoby, M., Kneib, M., Wang, Y., Fugger, S., 
 Pellicciotti, F.  Thinning and surface mass balance patterns of two neighbouring debris-covered glaciers in the southeastern Tibetan Plateau. The Cryosphere 10.5194/tc-17-3895-2023 Data Management & Analytics Water Distribution Networks Abstract. Debris-covered glaciers are a common feature of the mountain cryosphere in the southeastern Tibetan Plateau. A better understanding of these glaciers is necessary to reduce the uncertainties in regional water resource variability and to anticipate potential cryospheric risks. In this study, we quantified the seasonal thinning and surface mass balance patterns of two neighbouring debris-covered glaciers (23K Glacier and 24K Glacier) in the southeastern Tibetan Plateau with four unpiloted aerial vehicle surveys and in situ measurements. We observed that the thinning of 23K Glacier was ∌2–7 times greater than that of the 24K Glacier for annual and cold periods. The surface velocity of the 24K Glacier is higher than that of the 23K Glacier (∌5–6 times) for all periods. In contrast with the thinning patterns, the surface mass balance patterns of the two glaciers closely agree across the different periods. We found that the surface mass balance distribution strongly correlated with the spatial distribution of debris thickness for both glaciers. Ice cliffs and supraglacial ponds are prevalent on the surface of these glaciers (∌4.4–7.2±0.5 %) and enhance melt overall (enhancement factor: ∌2.5) but do not control the surface mass balance pattern of either glacier. This comparison study of two neighbouring glaciers confirms the significance of both glacier dynamics and debris thickness in controlling thinning and melt for the different debris-covered glaciers of the southeastern Tibetan Plateau in the context of climate change. 772751