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| Titel |
Snow cover changes in the Hindu-Kush Karakoram Himalaya |
| VerfasserIn |
Silvia Terzago, Jost von Hardenberg, Elisa Palazzi, Antonello Provenzale |
| Konferenz |
EGU General Assembly 2013
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| Medientyp |
Artikel
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| Sprache |
Englisch
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| Digitales Dokument |
PDF |
| Erschienen |
In: GRA - Volume 15 (2013) |
| Datensatznummer |
250082118
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| Zusammenfassung |
| Snow cover plays a key role in high-altitude environments, and changes in the snow spatial/temporal distribution and thickness affect energy, radiation and water budgets at the Earth’s surface. In particular, a reduction in the snow amount has a direct effect on the availability and seasonal distribution of water resources. This is especially true in areas such as the Hindu-Kush Karakoram Himalaya (HKKH) region, which provides water to about 1.5 Billion peoples in India, Nepal, Pakistan and China.
Despite its importance, knowledge on snow dynamics in the HKKH region is still incomplete, owing also to sparse and sporadic surface observations. In this work, we used simulations from Global Climate Models (GCMs) to gain information on snowpack characteristics and climatology in the HKKH region. We selected a set of GCM snow depth datasets from the CMIP5 ensemble, esploring snow abundance and distribution at monthly scale. In order to investigate how well Global Climate Models represent the snow climatology, we compared the results with the ERA-Interim reanalysis, used as an approximation to the real conditions.
After exploring the average snow conditions in the last decades, we analyzed the effects of climate change in the HKKH region by using an ensemble of future snow projections obtained from different GCMs and in different climate change scenarios. |
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