Glacial mass balance changes in the Karakoram and Himalaya based on CMIP5 multi-model climate projections

Rajiv Chaturvedi (), Anil Kulkarni, Yogesh Karyakarte, Jaideep Joshi and G. Bala

Climatic Change, 2014, vol. 123, issue 2, 315-328

Abstract: The impact of future climate change on the glaciers in the Karakoram and Himalaya (KH) is investigated using CMIP5 multi-model temperature and precipitation projections, and a relationship between glacial accumulation-area ratio and mass balance developed for the region based on the last 30 to 40 years of observational data. We estimate that the current glacial mass balance (year 2000) for the entire KH region is -6.6 ± 1 Gta −1 , which decreases about sixfold to -35 ± 2 Gta −1 by the 2080s under the high emission scenario of RCP8.5. However, under the low emission scenario of RCP2.6 the glacial mass loss only doubles to -12 ± 2 Gta −1 by the 2080s. We also find that 10.6 and 27 % of the glaciers could face ‘eventual disappearance’ by the end of the century under RCP2.6 and RCP8.5 respectively, underscoring the threat to water resources under high emission scenarios. Copyright Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht 2014

Date: 2014
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Downloads: (external link)
http://hdl.handle.net/10.1007/s10584-013-1052-5 (text/html)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:spr:climat:v:123:y:2014:i:2:p:315-328

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.springer.com/economics/journal/10584

DOI: 10.1007/s10584-013-1052-5

Access Statistics for this article

Climatic Change is currently edited by M. Oppenheimer and G. Yohe

More articles in Climatic Change from Springer
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().