Temperature Decoupling on the World’s Mountain Glaciers

The development of a katabatic boundary layer can decouple near surface air temperature changes over glaciers from their surrounding environment during the ablation season, impacting the response of glaciers to ongoing climate change. Current glacier modelling efforts mostly neglect such processes and assume that glacier mass balance will evolve linearly with large-scale (ambient) air temperature changes into the future. Recent work has established that glacier evolution with climate will likely be non-linear, including in its sensitivity to ambient temperature. While past studies have explored this near-surface decoupling at a number of individual sites, the derived patterns have not been generalisable. We compile an extensive new inventory of on-glacier weather station data to explore this phenomena, with over 175 glacier-year sets, including more than 350 individual AWS locations and > 1.3 million hourly air temperature observations. Combining in situ on-glacier and near-glacier meteorological data with reanalysis and surface topography information we are able to explore how the climatic setting and local processes (e.g. wind interactions and local topography) may shape a glacier’s ability to become more or less coupled to the ambient climatic warming. Across all sites studied we find a mean (std.) cold bias of on-glacier vs. ambient temperatures of 1.22±1.35°C and a ratio of above-ice temperature changes compared to ambient, non-glacier conditions of 0.75±0.17 (i.e. a 1°C increase off-glacier equals ~0.75°C change on-glacier). We highlight the relevance of this to glacier modelling applications at select glacier sites and demonstrate hotspots around the world where above-glacier temperature changes during the recent decades are likely to have become decoupled from background warming. Preliminary results show how larger glaciers in maritime climates and those with minimal debris cover are most likely to decouple from ambient warming. However, as glaciers shrink and debris cover expands, the influence of the climatic setting in controlling this decoupling is diminished.