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-1771 Peer reviewed articles 2021 Pascal Buri, Evan Miles, Jakob Steiner, Silvan Ragettli, Francesca Pellicciotti Supraglacial ice cliffs can substantially increase the mass loss of debris-covered glaciers Geophysical Research Letters 10.1029/2020gl092150 Data Management & Analytics Water Reuse AbstractThe thinning patterns of debris‐covered glaciers in High Mountain Asia are not well understood. Here we calculate the effect of supraglacial ice cliffs on the mass balance of all glaciers in a Himalayan catchment, using a process‐based ice cliff melt model. We show that ice cliffs are responsible for higher than expected thinning rates of debris‐covered glacier tongues, leading to an underestimation of their ice mass loss of 17% ± 4% in the catchment if not considered. We also show that cliffs do enhance melt where other processes would suppress it, that is, at high elevations, or where debris is thick, and that they contribute relatively more to glacier mass loss if oriented north. Our approach provides a key contribution to our understanding of the mass losses of debris‐covered glaciers, and a new quantification of their catchment wide melt and mass balance. 772751
publications-1772 Peer reviewed articles 2020 W. W. Immerzeel, A. F. Lutz, M. Andrade, A. Bahl, H. Biemans, T. Bolch, S. Hyde, S. Brumby, B. J. Davies, A. C. Elmore, A. Emmer, M. Feng, A. Fernández, U. Haritashya, J. S. Kargel, M. Koppes, P. D. A. Kraaijenbrink, A. V. Kulkarni, P. A. Mayewski, S. Nepal, P. Pacheco, T. H. Painter, F. Pellicciotti, H. Rajaram, S. Rupper, A. Sinisalo, A. B. Shrestha, D. Viviroli, Y. Wada, C. Xiao, T. Yao, J. E. Importance and vulnerability of the world’s water towers Nature 10.1038/s41586-019-1822-y Data Management & Analytics Groundwater No abstract available 772751
publications-1773 Peer reviewed articles 2022 Andrew Orr, Bashir Ahmad, Undala Alam, ArivudaiNambi Appadurai, Zareen P.Bharucha, Hester Biemans, Tobias Bolch, Narayan P. Chaulagain, Sanita Dhaubanjar, A.P. Dimri, Harry Dixon, Hayley J. Fowler, Giovanna Gioli, Sarah J. Halvorson, Abid Hussain, Ghulam Jeelani, Simi Kamal, Imran S. Khalid, Shiyin Liu, Arthur Lutz, Meeta K. Mehra, Evan Miles, Andrea Momblanch, Veruska Muccione, Aditi Mukherji, Da Knowledge priorities on climate change and water in the Upper Indus Basin: a horizon scanning exercise to identify the top 100 research questions in social and natural sciences Earth's Future 10.1029/2021ef002619 IoT & Sensors Wastewater Treatment Plants AbstractRiver systems originating from the Upper Indus Basin (UIB) are dominated by runoff from snow and glacier melt and summer monsoonal rainfall. These water resources are highly stressed as huge populations of people living in this region depend on them, including for agriculture, domestic use, and energy production. Projections suggest that the UIB region will be affected by considerable (yet poorly quantified) changes to the seasonality and composition of runoff in the future, which are likely to have considerable impacts on these supplies. Given how directly and indirectly communities and ecosystems are dependent on these resources and the growing pressure on them due to ever‐increasing demands, the impacts of climate change pose considerable adaptation challenges. The strong linkages between hydroclimate, cryosphere, water resources, and human activities within the UIB suggest that a multi‐ and inter‐disciplinary research approach integrating the social and natural/environmental sciences is critical for successful adaptation to ongoing and future hydrological and climate change. Here we use a horizon scanning technique to identify the Top 100 questions related to the most pressing knowledge gaps and research priorities in social and natural sciences on climate change and water in the UIB. These questions are on the margins of current thinking and investigation and are clustered into 14 themes, covering three overarching topics of “governance, policy, and sustainable solutions”, “socioeconomic processes and livelihoods”, and “integrated Earth System processes”. Raising awareness of these cutting‐edge knowledge gaps and opportunities will hopefully encourage researchers, funding bodies, practitioners, and policy makers to address them. 772751
publications-1774 Peer reviewed articles 2023 Jouberton, A., Miles, E. S., Shaw, T. E., McCarthy, M., Fugger, S., & Pellicciotti, F. Reply to Yang et al.: global warming and black carbon simultaneously lead to glacier mass decline over the southeastern Tibetan Plateau Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America 10.1073/pnas.2301467120 Data Management & Analytics Uncategorized No abstract available 772751
publications-1775 Peer reviewed articles 2021 M. Kneib, E.S. Miles, S. Jola, P. Buri, S. Herreid, A. Bhattacharya, C.S. Watson, T. Bolch, D. Quincey, F. Pellicciotti Mapping ice cliffs on debris-covered glaciers using multispectral satellite images Remote Sensing of Environment 10.1016/j.rse.2020.112201 AI & Machine Learning Precipitation & Ecological Systems No abstract available 772751
publications-1776 Peer reviewed articles 2020 Sam Herreid, Francesca Pellicciotti The state of rock debris covering Earth’s glaciers Nature Geoscience 10.1038/s41561-020-0615-0 Data Management & Analytics Wastewater Treatment Plants No abstract available 772751
publications-1777 Peer reviewed articles 2019 Marc Girona‐Mata, Evan S. Miles, Silvan Ragettli, Francesca Pellicciotti High‐Resolution Snowline Delineation From Landsat Imagery to Infer Snow Cover Controls in a Himalayan Catchment Water Resources Research 10.1029/2019wr024935 AI & Machine Learning Water Distribution Networks AbstractThe snow cover dynamics of High Mountain Asia are usually assessed at spatial resolutions of 250 m or greater, but this scale is too coarse to clearly represent the rugged topography common to the region. Higher‐resolution measurement of snow‐covered area often results in biased sampling due to cloud cover and deep shadows. We therefore develop a Normalized Difference Snow Index‐based workflow to delineate snow lines from Landsat Thematic Mapper/Enhanced Thematic Mapper+ imagery and apply it to the upper Langtang Valley in Nepal, processing 194 scenes spanning 1999 to 2013. For each scene, we determine the spatial distribution of snow line altitudes (SLAs) with respect to aspect and across six subcatchments. Our results show that the mean SLA exhibits distinct seasonal behavior based on aspect and subcatchment position. We find that SLA dynamics respond to spatial and seasonal trade‐offs in precipitation, temperature, and solar radiation, which act as primary controls. We identify two SLA spatial gradients, which we attribute to the effect of spatially variable precipitation. Our results also reveal that aspect‐related SLA differences vary seasonally and are influenced by solar radiation. In terms of seasonal dominant controls, we demonstrate that the snow line is controlled by snow precipitation in winter, melt in premonsoon, a combination of both in postmonsoon, and temperature in monsoon, explaining to a large extent the spatial and seasonal variability of the SLA in the upper Langtang Valley. We conclude that while SLA and snow‐covered area are complementary metrics, the SLA has a strong potential for understanding local‐scale snow cover dynamics and their controlling mechanisms. 772751
publications-1778 Peer reviewed articles 2019 JAKOB F. STEINER, PASCAL BURI, EVAN S. MILES, SILVAN RAGETTLI, FRANCESCA PELLICCIOTTI Supraglacial ice cliffs and ponds on debris-covered glaciers: spatio-temporal distribution and characteristics Journal of Glaciology 10.1017/jog.2019.40 Simulation & Modeling Water Reuse ABSTRACTIce cliffs and ponds on debris-covered glaciers have received increased attention due to their role in amplifying local melt. However, very few studies have looked at these features on the catchment scale to determine their patterns and changes in space and time. We have compiled a detailed inventory of cliffs and ponds in the Langtang catchment, central Himalaya, from six high-resolution satellite orthoimages and DEMs between 2006 and 2015, and a historic orthophoto from 1974. Cliffs cover between 1.4% (± 0.4%) in the dry and 3.4% (± 0.9%) in the wet seasons and ponds between 0.6% (± 0.1%) and 1.6% (± 0.3%) of the total debris-covered tongues. We find large variations between seasons, as cliffs and ponds tend to grow in the wetter monsoon period, but there is no obvious trend in total area over the study period. The inventory further shows that cliffs are predominately north-facing irrespective of the glacier flow direction. Both cliffs and ponds appear in higher densities several hundred metres from the terminus in areas where tributaries reach the main glacier tongue. On the largest glacier in the catchment ~10% of all cliffs and ponds persisted over nearly a decade. 772751
publications-1779 Peer reviewed articles 2022 Michael McCarthy, Evan Miles, Marin Kneib, Pascal Buri, Stefan Fugger, Francesca Pellicciotti Supraglacial debris thickness and supply rate in High-Mountain Asia Communications Earth & Environment 10.1038/s43247-022-00588-2 IoT & Sensors Wastewater Treatment Plants AbstractSupraglacial debris strongly modulates glacier melt rates and can be decisive for ice dynamics and mountain hydrology. It is ubiquitous in High-Mountain Asia, yet because its thickness and supply rate from local topography are poorly known, our ability to forecast regional glacier change and streamflow is limited. Here we combined remote sensing and numerical modelling to resolve supraglacial debris thickness by altitude for 4689 glaciers in High-Mountain Asia, and debris-supply rate to 4141 of those glaciers. Our results reveal extensively thin supraglacial debris and high spatial variability in both debris thickness and supply rate. Debris-supply rate increases with the temperature and slope of debris-supply slopes regionally, and debris thickness increases as ice flow decreases locally. Our centennial-scale estimates of debris-supply rate are typically an order of magnitude or more lower than millennial-scale estimates of headwall-erosion rate from Beryllium-10 cosmogenic nuclides, potentially reflecting episodic debris supply to the region’s glaciers. 772751
publications-1780 Peer reviewed articles 2024 Stefan Fugger, TE Shaw, Achille Jouberton, ES Miles, Pascal Buri, Michael James McCarthy, Catriona Fyffe, Simone Fatichi, Marin Kneib, Peter Molnar, Francesca Pellicciotti Hydrological regimes and evaporative flux partitioning at the climatic ends of High Mountain Asia Environmental Research Letters 10.1088/1748-9326/ad25a0 AI & Machine Learning Wastewater Treatment Plants Abstract High elevation headwater catchments are complex hydrological systems that seasonally buffer water and release it in the form of snow and ice melt, modulating downstream runoff regimes and water availability. In High Mountain Asia (HMA), where a wide range of climates from semi-arid to monsoonal exist, the importance of the cryospheric contributions to the water budget varies with the amount and seasonal distribution of precipitation. Losses due to evapotranspiration and sublimation are to date largely unquantified components of the water budget in such catchments, although they can be comparable in magnitude to glacier melt contributions to streamflow. Here, we simulate the hydrology of three high elevation headwater catchments in distinct climates in HMA over 10 years using an ecohydrological model geared towards high-mountain areas including snow and glaciers, forced with reanalysis data. Our results show that evapotranspiration and sublimation together are most important at the semi-arid site, Kyzylsu, on the northernmost slopes of the Pamir mountain range. Here, the evaporative loss amounts to 28% of the water throughput, which we define as the total water added to, or removed from the water balance within a year. In comparison, evaporative losses are 19% at the Central Himalayan site Langtang and 13% at the wettest site, 24 K, on the Southeastern Tibetan Plateau. At the three sites, respectively, sublimation removes 15%, 13% and 6% of snowfall, while evapotranspiration removes the equivalent of 76%, 28% and 19% of rainfall. In absolute terms, and across a comparable elevation range, the highest ET flux is 413 mm yr−1 at 24 K, while the highest sublimation flux is 91 mm yr−1 at Kyzylsu. During warm and dry years, glacier melt was found to only partially compensate for the annual supply deficit. 772751