I'd like to share a series of posts with you during this summer, keeping you up to date on the research I'm currently a tiny, tiny part of. I'm lucky enough to have been offered a spot in Innsbruck for the coming months, doing the research for my thesis. So right now I have a beautiful view of the snowy Patscherkofel, from the Innsbruck office.
In the project 'Multiscale Snow/Icemelt Discharge Simulation into Alpine Reservoirs' the spatial and temporal melt and discharge patterns of a glacierised catchment area in the region of Tyrol (Austria/ Italy) are investigated.
Coupling a physically based snow/ice model, a discharge model and, in the future, a glacier evolution model, snow distribution and discharge is simulated. Airborne laser scan and station data from the catchment form vital tools for calibration and validation of the models.
Important goals for the project include the extrapolation to a larger temporal and spatial scale, assessing glacier melt, snow distribution and consequent river discharge under climate change scenarios as described by the IPCC AR5 representative concentration pathways (RCPs).
Orange dot: Innsbruck, red arrow: catchment area (roughly). Source
My teeny-tiny contribution to all of this is, for now, looking at the historic area changes of a glaciers in the Ötztaler Alps. This is done using several available glacier inventories, comparing the inventories' stored data and creating a GIS based 'area over time' map. Using the models mentioned above, I/we will run a hindcast of the catchment, once with station and once with interpolated satellite data. As a result, coupled model performance will be evaluated. Exciting stuff!
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