Modelling the contribution of ice cliff melt to glacier mass loss at the catchment scale

The melt rates of debris-covered glaciers in High Mountain Asia are highly heterogeneous and poorly constrained. Supraglacial cliffs are typical surface features of debris-covered glaciers and act as windows of energy transfer from the atmosphere to the ice, locally enhancing melt and mass losses of otherwise insulated ice. Despite this, their contribution to the glacier mass budget has never been quantified at the glacier scale.

Here we simulate the specific melt of all supraglacial ice cliffs individually in a Himalayan catchment (Langtang Valley, Nepalese Himalayas), using a process-based ice cliff melt model that has previously been validated in the catchment. Cliff outlines and initial topography are derived from high-resolution stereo SPOT6-imagery and the model is forced by meteorological data from on- and off-glacier automatic weather stations within the valley, both for the 2014 melt season. The model simulates ice cliff backwasting by considering the cliff-atmosphere energy-balance, reburial by debris and the effects of adjacent ponds. We estimate the contribution of ice cliffs to glacier surface mass balance derived from ensemble mean geodetic thinning observations and emergence flux calculations for the same glaciers 2006-2015.

We show that ice cliffs, although covering only 2.1 ±0.6 % of the debris-covered tongues, are partially responsible for the high thinning rates of debris-covered glacier tongues, leading to a catchment mass loss underestimation of 17 ±4 % if not considered. We show that cliffs enhance melt where other processes would suppress it, i.e. at high elevations or where debris is thick, and confirm that they contribute relatively more to glacier mass loss if oriented north.

Our approach bridges a scale gap in our understanding of the processes of debris-covered glacier mass losses, and a new quantification of their catchment wide melt and mass balance.