A new approach to resolving climate-cryosphere relations: Downscaling climate dynamics to glacier-scale mass and energy balance without statistical scale linking

Abstract

[1] We present a novel combination of methods to quantify the local mass response of mountain glaciers to large-scale circulation. Previously, such multiscale approaches bypassed the mesoscale processes of the mountain-induced atmospheric flow, by statistical transfer functions or subgrid parameterizations, and included simplified glacier mass balance (MB) models. Here we show, on the basis of Kilimanjaro (East Africa) as a test case, that a limited area atmospheric model (LAM) and a process-resolving MB model can be linked without statistical corrections at their interface. This is evident from robust energy and MB patterns at the glacier surface, regardless of whether the MB model is forced by (1) in situ meteorological measurements or (2) uncorrected output from the high-resolution LAM grid over the glacier area. The latter is achieved by multiple grid nesting in the land-atmosphere-ocean domain of the LAM. Since this setup resolves the mesoscale process space, we also show the potential to increase knowledge of how dynamical, thermodynamic, and microphysical phenomena of the mountain-induced flow affect glacier MB. All these results are encouraging for future research because they demonstrate that a dynamical system, which operates on very different space-time scales, can be quantified in a fully physical way, if dynamic meteorology and glaciology are exploited in a complementary sense. This will enhance the process understanding of forward problems (glacier response to climate forcing) and backward problems (climate signal extraction from past extents of mountain glaciers).