Glacier melting and precipitation trends detected by surface area changes in Himalayan ponds

Salerno, Franco; Thakuri, Sudeep; Guyennon, Nicolas; Viviano, Gaetano; Tartari, Gianni

doi:10.5194/tc-10-1433-2016

Cited by 35 publications

(22 citation statements)

References 64 publications

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“…There is also an interhemispheric decline in precipitation over the subtropics (30-40 • N), which is most intense in the Mediterranean and mountainous regions of continental Asia. This shift has been also identified in the GPCP data set (Gu et al, 2016), as well as in various regional studies for the Mediterranean (Hoerling et al, 2012;Philandras et al, 2011), California (Diffenbaugh et al, 2015;Swain et al, 2016), and central Asia (Chen et al, 2011;Salerno et al, 2016). In our results, there are significant shifts in all quantiles of subtropic precipitation over land, except in the United States, where changes are more heterogeneous.…”

Section: Discussionsupporting

confidence: 91%

Assessment of Water Cycle Intensification Over Land using a Multisource Global Gridded Precipitation DataSet

et al. 2019

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The change in the empirical distribution of future global precipitation is one of the major implications regarding the intensification of global water cycle. Heavier events are expected to occur more often, compensated by decline of light precipitation and/or number of wet days. Here, we scrutinize a new global, high‐resolution precipitation data set, namely, the Multi‐Source Weighted‐Ensemble Precipitation v2.0, to determine changes in the precipitation distribution over land during 1979–2016. To this end, the fluctuations of wet days precipitation quantiles on an annual basis and their interplay with annual totals and number of wet days were investigated. The results show increase in total precipitation, number of wet days, and heavy events over land, as suggested by the intensification hypothesis. However, the decline in light/medium precipitation or wet days was weaker than expected, debating the “compensation” mechanism.

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Section: Discussionsupporting

confidence: 91%

Assessment of Water Cycle Intensification Over Land using a Multisource Global Gridded Precipitation DataSet

et al. 2019

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“…The annual precipitation was found to be decreasing at an alarming rate of −20 mm/year for the last two decades' tenure (Figure ). This decrease of the precipitation amount, particularly in the southern side of Mount Everest (containing large part of this study area), was also seen in the study carried out by Salerno et al (), which inferred to the decreasing trend of precipitation after mid‐1990s to recent years (2013 in their study).…”

Section: Resultssupporting

confidence: 86%

Spatial and Temporal Analysis of Precipitation Extremities of Eastern Nepal in the Last Two Decades (1997–2016)

Subba

2019

JGR Atmospheres

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In recent days there have been discussions regarding the impact of climate change and its vagaries of the weather, particularly concerning extreme events. Nepal, being a mountainous country, is more susceptible to precipitation extreme events and related hazards, which hinder the socioeconomic development of the nation. In this regard, this study aimed to address this phenomenon for one of the most naturally and socioeconomically important regions of Nepal, namely, Eastern Nepal. The data were collected for the period of 1997 to 2016. The interdecadal comparison for two periods (1997–2006 and 2007–2016) was maintained for the calculation of extreme precipitation indices as per recommended by Expert Team on Climate Change Detection and Indices. Linear trends were calculated by using Mann‐Kendall and Sen's Slope estimator. The average annual precipitation was found to be decreasing at an alarming rate of −20 mm/year in the last two decades' tenure. In case of extreme precipitation events, consecutive dry days, one of the frequency indices, showed a solo increase in its trend (mostly significant). Meanwhile, all the intensity indices of extreme precipitation showed decreasing trends (mostly insignificant). Thus, it can be concluded that Eastern Nepal has witnessed some significant drier days in the last two decades, as the events of heavy, very heavy, extremely heavy precipitation events, and annual wet day precipitation (PRCPTOT) were found to be decreasing. The same phenomena were also seen in the Tropical Rainfall Measuring Mission 3B42 V7 satellite precipitation product for whole Nepal.

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“…This may be because of decline of precipitation in the study area which constitutes the important recharge source for most of the OLs (Basnett et al, 2013). Salerno et al (2016) also observed that the disconnected lake ice ponds decreased significantly over the period due to a reduction in overall precipitation on the southern slopes of Mt Everest in Sagarmatha National Park (SNP). The similar shrinkage of disconnected lakes has also been reported in western Himalaya (Shukla and Qadir, 2016).…”

Section: Temporal Evolution Of Lakesmentioning

confidence: 67%

Evolution of Glacial and High-Altitude Lakes in the Sikkim, Eastern Himalaya Over the Past Four Decades (1975–2017)

Shukla

Garg

Srivastava

2018

Front. Environ. Sci.

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Global climate change is significantly triggering the dynamic evolution of high-mountain lakes which may pose a serious threat to downstream areas, warranting their systematic and regular monitoring. This study presents the first temporal inventory of glacial and high-altitude lakes in the Sikkim, Eastern Himalaya for four points in time i.e., 1975, 1991, 2000, and 2017 using Hexagon, TM, ETM+, and OLI images, respectively. First, a baseline data was generated for the year 2000 and then the multi-temporal lake changes were assessed. The annual mapping of SGLs was also performed for four consecutive years (2014)(2015)(2016)(2017) to analyze their nature and occurrence pattern. The results show an existence of 463 glacial and high-altitude lakes ( > 0.003 km 2 ) in 2000 which were grouped into four classes: supraglacial (SGL; 50) pro/peri glacial lake in contact with glacier (PGLC; 35), pro/peri glacial lake away from glacier (PGLA; 112) and other lakes (OL; 266). The mean size of lakes is 0.06 km 2 and about 87% lakes have area < 0.1 km 2 . The number of lakes increased (by 9%) from 425 in 1975 to 466 in 2017, accompanied by a rapid areal expansion from 25.17 ± 1.90 to 31.24 ± 2.36 km 2 (24%). The maximum expansion in number (106%) and area (138%) was observed in SGLs, followed by PGLCs (number: 34%; area: 90%). Contrarily no significant change was found in other lakes. The annual SGL mapping reveals that their number (area) increased from 81 (543,153 m 2 ) to 96 (840,973 m 2 ) between 2014 and 2017. Occurrence pattern of SGLs shows that maximum number of lakes ( > 80%) are persistent in nature, followed by drain-out (15-20%) and recurring type lakes (7-8%). The new-formed lakes (9-17%) were consistently noticed in all the years (2014)(2015)(2016)(2017). The results of this study underline that regional climate is accelerating the cryosphere thawing and if the current trend continues, further glacier melting will likely occur. Therefore, formation of new lakes and expansion of existing lakes is expected in the study area leading to increase in potential of glacial lake outburst floods. Thereby, persistent attention should be paid to the influences of climatic change in the region.

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Glacier melting and precipitation trends detected by surface area changes in Himalayan ponds

Cited by 35 publications

References 64 publications

Assessment of Water Cycle Intensification Over Land using a Multisource Global Gridded Precipitation DataSet

Assessment of Water Cycle Intensification Over Land using a Multisource Global Gridded Precipitation DataSet

Spatial and Temporal Analysis of Precipitation Extremities of Eastern Nepal in the Last Two Decades (1997–2016)

Evolution of Glacial and High-Altitude Lakes in the Sikkim, Eastern Himalaya Over the Past Four Decades (1975–2017)

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