Abstract
The Tien Shan and Pamir mountains host over 28,000 glaciers providing essential water resources for increasing water demand in Central Asia. A disequilibrium between glaciers and climate affects meltwater release to Central Asian rivers, challenging the region's water availability. Previous research has neglected temporal variability. We present glacier mass balance estimates based on transient snowline and geodetic surveys with unprecedented spatiotemporal resolution from 1999/00 to 2017/18. Our results reveal spatiotemporal heterogeneity characterized by two mass balance clusters: (a) positive, low variability, and (b) negative, high variability. This translates into variable glacial meltwater release (≈1–16%) of annual river runoff for two watersheds. Our study reveals more complex climate forcing‐runoff responses and importance of glacial meltwater variability for the region than suggested previously.
Highlights
Most glaciers around the world are retreating (IPCC, 2013)
We present a methodology, combining multi-year elevation change maps with frequent snowline observations to estimate mass changes and variability at annual scale, which allows us identifying so-far unrecognised regions of contrasting trends for the Tien Shan and Pamir mountains
Our results extends the analysis of spatially heterogeneous glacier responses to the spatio-temporal dimension, and characterise the discharge variability for two mediumsize watersheds in Tien Shan (Naryn River) and Pamir (Gunt River) over the past two decades
Summary
Annual glacier mass balance for Central Asia (1999/00–2017/18) is derived by combining transient snowlines, geodetic surveys and modelling. Strong spatio-temporal heterogeneity with contrasting patterns of mass gain and loss are found. Hot spots of heterogeneous mass balance variability are associated with highly variable glacier melt water runoff. This article has been accepted for publication and undergone full peer review but has not been through the copyediting, typesetting, pagination and proofreading process, which may lead to differences between this version and the Version of Record.
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