Towards elaboration of a surface mass balance model of a mountain glacier using a stochastic weather generator

Mathematical modeling of surface mass balance (SMB) of mountain glaciers requires appropriate climatic forcing. Normally, meteorological records from the weather stations located as close as possible to the glacier are used for this purpose. In the ideal case, a weather station is located directly on the glacier. Even then, weather records are comparatively short and are hardly applicable for transient simulation of glacier dynamics. Thus, the lack of observations is an obvious obstacle for obtaining reliable simulation results. To overcome it, we suggest to apply a simple stochastic weather generator to emulate synthetic records of surface air temperature, precipitation and other meteorological variables required for calculation SMB by an energy-balance model.

Weather generators have been applied in many geophysical applications for decades, except, paradoxically, for glaciological ones. This is a powerful tool enabling generation of synthetic records which are statistically similar to observations (including probability distribution, standard deviations, autocorrelations etc.).

We report about the work in progress, which aims at elaboration of a reliable methodology for SMB calculation in diverse environmental conditions.

The study was supported by Russian Foundation of Basic Research RFBR (grant Nos. 18-05-00420 and 18-05-60080).