On the importance of subsurface heat flux for estimating the mass balance of alpine glaciers

Glaciers, as massive freshwater reservoirs, support the planet's living systems and have an impact on our daily lives, even for communities living far away. Ongoing and future climate change is predicted to have strong impacts on the mass balance of alpine glacier around the world. To understand the relationship between climate and glacier dynamics, a range of mass balance models are currently used. Most of these models however, ignore subsurface heat fluxes as a component of glacier mass balance. Here, we set out to investigate the importance of subsurface heat flux for the mass balance of an alpine glacier using a surface energy mass balance model (SEM) coupled with a multilayer subsurface heat conduction model (MSHCM) that resolves the subsurface glacier temperature. As a case study, we investigate the Urumqi Glacier No.1 in the Tianshan Mountains (NW China), which has a long and continuous time series of surface and subsurface glacier temperature measurements. We evaluate the results of both glacier temperature models (SEM and MSHCM) using these in situ observations and investigate the sensitivity of mass balance to five meteorological factors: air temperature, precipitation, incoming shortwave radiation, relative humidity, and wind speed. The mass balance of the glacier was simulated first by including the influence of subsurface heat flux, and second, the subsurface heat flux was neglected. Observed and simulated mass balance and the englacial temperature were found to be reasonably close in both cases. Furthermore, the mass balance was simulated with a zero surface temperature assumption, which resulted in a 6% overestimation of the summer ablation. We concluded that the mass balance of Urumqi Glacier No.1 was most sensitive to variations in temperature, followed by precipitation. Furthermore, our results show that subsurface heat flux in the ablation area can generally be neglected in estimating the mass balance of alpine glaciers during ablation season.

Automated summary

Glacial mass balance is significantly affected by subsurface heat flux, but can generally be neglected during the ablation season. The study found that temperature variations had the most impact on the mass balance of Urumqi Glacier No.1, followed by precipitation.