Abstract. Glaciers in the European Alps play an important role in
the hydrological cycle, act as a source for hydroelectricity and have a
large touristic importance. The future evolution of these glaciers is driven
by surface mass balance and ice flow processes, of which the latter is to
date not included explicitly in regional glacier projections for the Alps.
Here, we model the future evolution of glaciers in the European Alps with
GloGEMflow, an extended version of the Global Glacier Evolution Model (GloGEM),
in which both surface mass balance and ice flow are explicitly
accounted for. The mass balance model is calibrated with glacier-specific
geodetic mass balances and forced with high-resolution regional climate
model (RCM) simulations from the EURO-CORDEX ensemble. The evolution of the
total glacier volume in the coming decades is relatively similar under the
various representative concentrations pathways (RCP2.6, 4.5 and 8.5), with
volume losses of about 47 %–52 % in 2050 with respect to 2017. We find that
under RCP2.6, the ice loss in the second part of the 21st century is
relatively limited and that about one-third (36.8 % ± 11.1 %,
multi-model mean ±1σ) of the present-day (2017) ice volume
will still be present in 2100. Under a strong warming (RCP8.5) the future
evolution of the glaciers is dictated by a substantial increase in surface
melt, and glaciers are projected to largely disappear by 2100 (94.4±4.4 %
volume loss vs. 2017). For a given RCP, differences in future
changes are mainly determined by the driving global climate model (GCM),
rather than by the RCM, and these differences are larger than those arising
from various model parameters (e.g. flow parameters and cross-section
parameterisation). We find that under a limited warming, the inclusion of
ice dynamics reduces the projected mass loss and that this effect increases
with the glacier elevation range, implying that the inclusion of ice
dynamics is likely to be important for global glacier evolution projections.
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