Glacier and Hydrological Response to Climate Change in the Khumbu Valley, Nepal

Glaciers in High Mountain Asia supply freshwater to over 800 million people. However, glaciers can also present risk: high levels of runoff as well as glacial lake outbursts can cause floods, which take lives and destroy infrastructure, and are predicted to increase in the Himalaya-Karakoram region. The future extent of glaciers in High Mountain Asia is, however, highly uncertain, not least because we lack models of glacier melt that are simultaneously computationally tractable and physically realistic. How much meltwater runs off (versus being stored or re-frozen) is also not well understood. This project will address these critical research gaps by leveraging the new network of weather stations installed on Mt. Everest, which now spans the full elevation range of glaciers in High Mountain Asia. These data, along with satellite observations, will be used to improve physically realistic, yet parsimonious mass balance models for the Khumbu Glacier, Nepal. Findings from the Khumbu Valley case study can be upscaled to improve understanding of the Central Himalayan water tower.