Speaker
Description
High Mountain Asia’s (HMA) water resources are subject to changes and imbalances as climate change progresses. Research studies focused on High Mountain Asia are often either coarse large-scale studies or small-scale case studies that do not allow regional officials to make informed, actionable decisions within their spheres of influence. Previous work by Immerzeel and others in 2020 characterized changes observed in major hydrologic basins in HMA and calculated their vulnerability and importance for environmental and anthropogenic water demands. Since 2016, NASA’s High Mountain Asia Team (HiMAT) has been tasked with furthering our understanding of the sensitive relationship between HMA’s cryosphere and hydrosphere. HiMAT’s recent advances in modeling glacier behavior provide the opportunity to update Immerzeel’s assessment of the relative importance of glacier water storage and supply in HMA. In this study, we use data developed by HiMAT to calculate a monthly glacio-hydrologic index composed of the glacier storage and the glacier water yield for all HydroSHEDS level 7 basins in High Mountain Asia. This index is taken one step further and projected to the end of the century. In doing so, we can analyze the long-term effects of climate change on the water yielded by glaciers on a higher temporal and spatial resolution than previously done. This glacio-hydrologic disturbance index lays the groundwork for future indices that include snow, hazards, extreme events, and other environmental disturbances.
