Geofizički seminar 09.10.2019. u 13:15 h

The retreat of mountain glaciers and ice caps worldwide is one of the key indicators of ongoing climate change. On a global scale, the mass loss from glaciers contributes to sea level rise. On a regional and local scale, glacier melt-water is an important contributor to river flow during dry and warm parts of the year. Across the world, glacier-fed rivers are reliable sources of freshwater used for municipal water supply, agricultural irrigation, and hydropower generation. Current attempts to project the future of glaciers and their contribution to regional streamflow and global sea level rise rely on simplified numerical models whose parameters require site-specific calibration with observations. In the absence of these observations, the poorly constrained parameters cause large uncertainties in the projected glacier evolution. In this talk I will address the key uncertainties in the current projections, and introduce my research framework, which incorporates field observations, empirical and physics-based modelling and machine learning methods, to narrow these uncertainties.