EGU21-12250
https://doi.org/10.5194/egusphere-egu21-12250
EGU General Assembly 2021
© Author(s) 2022. This work is distributed under
the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License.

Modelling climate change impacts on glaciers and water resources in China  using OGGM and FUSE

Dan Goldberg1, Louis Kinnear1, Florian Kobierska-Baffie2, Nans Addor2, Helen He3, Qianyu Zha3, Nele Reyniers3, and Fabien Maussion4
Dan Goldberg et al.
  • 1University of Edinburgh, School of GeoSciences, Edinburgh, United Kingdom of Great Britain – England, Scotland, Wales (dan.goldberg@ed.ac.uk)
  • 2Geography, College of Life and Environmental Sciences, University of Exeter, UK.
  • 3School of Environmental Sciences, University of East Anglia, NR4 7TJ, Norwich, UK
  • 4Department of Atmospheric and Cryospheric Sciences, University of Innsbruck, Innsbruck, Austria

Hundreds of millions of people depend strongly on hydrological inputs in the mountainous regions of China and central Asia. Glacier runoff is a major contributor to this hydrological forcing, yet many glaciers in the region have undergone mass loss in recent years and this mass loss is expected to continue or increase in response to climatological change. As such it is important to assess the large-scale response of High Mountain Asia glaciers to climate change , and its effects on hydrology. We present here preliminary modelling investigations of glacier change and hydrological impacts in response to high-resolution climate model projections over the 21st century as a component of the project SWARM (Impacts Assessment to Support WAter Resources Management and Climate Change Adaptation for China). Our model chain consists of i) Open Global Glacier Model (OGGM), which allows for high-resolution glacier flowline modelling of multiple glaciers, and ii) the Framework for Understanding Structural Errors (FUSE) a modular framework for snow and hydrology modelling, which we used to assemble and run three hydrological models over the whole of China. Both FUSE and OGGM are forced by an ensemble of bias-corrected CORDEX-East Asia regional climate models (in turn forced by CMIP5 general circulation models), and outputs of OGGM are provided to FUSE. We discuss our application of OGGM to 80,000 glaciers in Chinese river catchments; our efforts to calibrate the mass balance model using an expanded set of geodetic mass balance constraints; and finally the projections of glacier, snow and streamflow changes in the 21st century. In particular, we discuss the robustness and uncertainties in the projections as sampled by our multi-model ensemble.

How to cite: Goldberg, D., Kinnear, L., Kobierska-Baffie, F., Addor, N., He, H., Zha, Q., Reyniers, N., and Maussion, F.: Modelling climate change impacts on glaciers and water resources in China  using OGGM and FUSE, EGU General Assembly 2021, online, 19–30 Apr 2021, EGU21-12250, https://doi.org/10.5194/egusphere-egu21-12250, 2021.

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