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

亚洲高山的冰川为超过8亿人提供淡水。然而，冰川也可能带来风险：高水平的径流以及冰川湖的爆发可能导致洪水，夺走生命并摧毁基础设施，预计在喜马拉雅-喀喇昆仑地区这种情况会增加。然而，亚洲高山地区冰川的未来范围是高度不确定的，尤其是因为我们缺乏同时在计算上易于处理和在物理上真实的冰川融化模型。有多少融水流失（相对于被储存或重新冷冻）也不是很清楚。该项目将利用安装在珠穆朗玛峰上的新的气象站网络来解决这些关键的研究空白，该网络现在跨越了亚洲高山冰川的整个海拔范围。这些数据，连同卫星观测，将用于改进尼泊尔昆布冰川的物理上真实的，但吝啬的物质平衡模型。昆布谷案例研究的结果可以扩大，以提高对喜马拉雅中部水塔的了解。

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.