Changing glaciers in a changing climate through changing modelling approaches

Glaciers outside the ice sheets are key contributors to sea-level rise and act as essential fresh-water resources in various regions around the world. Glaciers are also important sources of natural hazards, directly impact biodiversity, and have a significant touristic value. Given these crucial societal and environmental roles, having reliable projections on the evolution of these precious ice bodies under changing climatic conditions is of paramount importance.

 

In this presentation, I will highlight how modelling glacier changes goes hand in hand with rapidly increasing remotely sensed glacier observations and derived products at the global scale (e.g., glacier outlines, surface elevation, ice thickness, surface velocities, and elevation changes). These new observations, combined with ever-increasing computational capacities and novel numerical tools have recently allowed us to transition from modelling a few individual glaciers to now modelling the evolution of glaciers at regional- to global scales while accounting for ice-dynamical processes. Whereas these recent advances are encouraging, I will also highlight the challenges that we are still facing and that we will need to tackle in the coming years to provide more trustworthy glacier evolution projections.