Topography and climate in the upper Indus Basin: Mapping elevation-snow cover relationships

Abstract

The Upper Indus Basin (UIB), which covers a wide range of climatic and topographic settings, provides an ideal venue to explore the relationship between climate and topography. While the distribution of snow and glaciers is spatially and temporally heterogeneous, there exist regions with similar elevation-snow relationships. In this work, we construct elevation-binned snow-cover statistics to analyze 3415 watersheds and 7357 glaciers in the UIB region. We group both glaciers and watersheds using a hierarchical clustering approach and find that (1) watershed clusters mirror large-scale moisture transport patterns and (2) are highly dependent on median watershed elevation. (3) Glacier clusters are spatially heterogeneous and are less strongly controlled by elevation, but rather by local topographic parameters that modify solar insolation. Our clustering approach allows us to clearly define self-similar snow-topographic regions. Eastern watersheds in the UIB show a steep snow cover-elevation relationship whereas watersheds in the central and western UIB have moderately sloped relationships, but cluster in distinct groups. We highlight this snow-cover-topographic transition zone and argue that these watersheds have different hydrologic responses than other regions. Our hierarchical clustering approach provides a potential new framework to use in defining climatic zones in the cyrosphere based on empirical data.