Journal
GEOPHYSICAL RESEARCH LETTERS
Volume 48, Issue 17, Pages -Publisher
AMER GEOPHYSICAL UNION
DOI: 10.1029/2021GL094071
Keywords
glaciers; tropical climate; CESM2; CLM5; mountain; GCM
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Funding
- Sedimentary Geology and Paleobiology program of the National Science Foundation [EAR-1849754]
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The study uses global climate models to simulate the historical situation of tropical mountain glaciers. It finds that the simulations underestimate the equilibrium line altitudes, with errors in large-scale model precipitation and ELA reconstruction uncertainty being the main contributors to this bias.
Tropical mountain glaciers are an important water resource and highly impacted by recent climate change. Tropical mountain glaciation also occurred in the recent and deep past, which presents opportunities for better validating paleoclimate simulations in continental interiors and mountainous regions but requires bridging global model scales (hundreds of kilometers) with the approximate to 1-10 km scale of glaciers when paleotopography is poorly known. Here, we hindcast tropical mountain glaciation in preindustrial time by using global climate model meteorology to force standalone simulations in its land component that use high-resolution topography to resolve selected tropical mountain glaciers. These simulations underestimate observed equilibrium line altitudes (ELAs) by 249 +/- 330 m, but the simulated ELA and snow lines capture observed intermountain ELA variability. Errors in large-scale model precipitation and ELA reconstruction uncertainty are the main contributors to this bias.
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