Abstract
The service seNorge (http://senorge.no) provides gridded temperature and precipitation for mainland Norway. The products are provided as interpolated station measurements on a 1×1 km grid. Precipitation gauges are predominantly located at lower elevations such as coastal areas and valleys. Therefore, there are large uncertainties in extrapolating precipitation data to higher altitudes, both due to sparsity of observations as well as the large spatial variability of precipitation in mountainous regions.Using gridded temperature and precipitation data from seNorge, surface mass balance was modeled for five Norwegian glaciers of different size and climate conditions. The model accounts for melting of snow and ice by applying a degree‐day approach and considers refreezing assuming a snow depth depended storage. Calculated values are compared to point measurements of glacier winter mass balance.On average for each glacier, modeled and measured surface mass‐balance evolutions agree well, but results at individual stake locations show large variability. Two types of problems were identified: first, grid data were not able to capture spatial mass balance variability at smaller glaciers. Second, a significant increase in the bias between model and observations with altitude for one glacier suggested that orographic enhancement of precipitation was not appropriately captured by the gridded interpolation.
Highlights
1.1 MotivationClimate change will be one of the major challenges to mankind in the 21st century
The applied temperature-index model was driven by gridded temperature and precipitation data from seNorge as input
Different vertical gradients were applied for modeling the mass balance of the glacierized area in Norway (Article II) and a constant correction factor was applied for each of the catchment for which discharge was investigated (Article III)
Summary
1.1 MotivationClimate change will be one of the major challenges to mankind in the 21st century. Giesen and Oerlemans, 2013; Braithwaite and Raper, 2002) since they show a large regional heterogeneity (Radić and others, 2014; Radić and Hock, 2011) Glaciers and their snow cover represent storage of water over a wide range of timescales (e.g. Jansson and others, 2003). Changes in glacier mass balance may have great effects on streamflow both in annual volume (e.g. Huss and others, 2008; Farinotti and others, 2012) and in magnitude of meltwater floods (e.g. Nolin and others, 2010; Jost and others, 2011). The requirement of temporally and spatially distributed input data is often a limiting factor for mass-balance modelling over long time-spans (Andreassen and Oerlemans, 2009) or over large areas
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