Osmanoglu

Project Summary

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Glacier mass loss in High Mountain Asia (HMA) may have far-reaching consequences for the region’s water resources. These changes in the HMA cryosphere are critical for the well-being of the people relying on the these freshwater resources in the vast downstream regions beyond the HMA itself. It is vital that such research be carried out now in order to allow us to estimate these transformations and to better arm the regional stakeholders with improved information and tools thus enabling improved planning and adaptation strategies. However the physical constraints, processes and dependencies of this unique climate-glacier-hydrology system are not well understood and large uncertainties of the glacio-hydrological response to future climate change remain due to the lack of detailed meteorological, glacier and hydrological data, the heterogeneity of climate processes, inaccessible terrain, and the topographical extreme relief. The proposed work aims to provide an integrated framework for the entire HMA region, suitable for understanding past changes in glacier mass and associated streamflow in response to climate change and for projecting those changes into the future combining extensive modeling with relevant glacier products from remote sensing.

Specifically we will a) use visible and radar remote sensing products to derive glacier volume changes, snow line altitudes and debris; b) apply a regional climate model with unprecedented spatial resolution to elucidate the regional-scale monsoon-driven climate dynamics with focus on precipitation patterns across the HMA region, c) model recent glacier changes and forecast future glacier evolution, and d) quantify the hydrological response to climate and glacier changes and forecast how those changes impact human water availability downstream of HMA. In addition we will develop and provide a rich set of integrated operational tools for assessing and forecasting regional-scale climate-driven glacier and hydrological changes for direct integration into the Glacial Melt Toolbox (GMELT) coordinated by NASA’s High Mountain Asia Team (HiMAT).

This project will, for the first time, integrate high-resolution modeling of the climate heterogeneity in HMA with regional-scale glacier-hydrological modeling specifically adjusted to HMA and informed by a suite of observations from in-situ and satellite-derived data. High resolution stereo imagery from DigitalGlobe satellites will generate glacier volume change calculations, while Landsat, MODIS, ASTER, VIIRS, ALOS-PALSAR1/2 and Sentinel1/1b satellites will be used for snow cover, and glacier debris cover mapping over the glaciers, and GRACE data will inform glacier mass balance modeling.

The project will foster collaboration between an interdisciplinary team of scientists from NASA, the University of Alaska and the University of New Hampshire with extensive experience in visible and radar remote sensing, high-resolution atmospheric modeling, glacier modeling, and regional-scale hydrological modeling.