TN-36 : Study of glacier melt and physics of glaciers

Abstract

The existence of a Perennial ice mass depends on the interplay of accumulation and ablation processes. Over a time scale of a year or more on a glacier, accumulation processes dominate in the upper reaches and ablation processes dominate in the lower reaches. The terrain factors play an important role in accumulation, ablation and on the time taken for melt water to travel through the basin. The debris deposits, their extent and thickness also affect the melting of glaciers.

Glaciers act as natural reservoirs, storing precipitation in the winter and releasing it in summer. Glaciers also store water for periods of years, retaining part of the annual precipitation during periods of their growth and releasing extra-water from storage during periods of recession. The routing of melt water through the glacier system has been a major problem in glacier melt modelling studies. The melt water enters the watershed storage system which functions in a manner analogous to a reservoir and displaces water in storage which appears subsequently in the channel system. The input varies with change in the rate of ablation and liquid precipitation.

Meso to Macro scale modelling with numerical iteration of the energy and mass fluxes may bring progress in this field. The much improved network of hydro meteorological stations in the inaccessible regions of snow and ice is essential to produce the necessary input data for these large-scale models. The hydrological conditions of glacier are hard to reveal because of difficulty of organizing long term observations and big spatial variability of conditions.