Modeling past and future variation of glaciers in the Dongkemadi Ice Field on central Tibetan Plateau from 1989 to 2050

ABSTRACT

Glacier mass balance change is among the best indicators of glacier response to climate change. Due to its inaccessibility and limited observation, little is known about the change to the Dongkemadi Ice Field (DIF) in the Tanggula Mountains located in the source region of the Yangtze River in central Tibetan Plateau. Here, an enhanced temperature index–based glacier model considering glacier area change was applied to study the temporal–spatial variation in mass balance on the DIF from 1989 to 2012 and to assess its response to climate change. The model was forced by reconstructed temperature and precipitation from adjacent national meteorological stations and validated by comparing with field observations from the Xiao Dongkemadi Glacier (XDG). Results show that the simulated mass balance is in good agreement with the observations (R² = 0.75, p < .001), and the model can reasonably reproduce well the glacier mass change. Then the model was applied to twenty individual glaciers in DIF and forced by the high-resolution regional climate model (RegCM3) from 2013 to 2050 to project their further variation. In the future, the mass balance of glaciers in DIF shows a continuously negative trend with a linear rate of −0.16 m water equivalent (w.e.) a⁻¹ in representative concentration pathway (RCP) 4.5 and −0.35 m w.e. a⁻¹ in RCP 8.5. Most of the glaciers’ equilibrium line altitudes (ELAs) will reach or exceed their maximum elevation after the 2030s. By coupling a modified volume–area scaling method with the mass balance model, results showed that areas of the individual glaciers in DIF will lose about 12.10 to 30.66 percent under RCP4.5 and 14.06 to 38.76 percent under RCP8.5, and the volume of the DIF will lose about 1.18 km³ in RCP4.5 and 1.44 km³ in RCP8.5 by the end of 2050. In addition, the terminuses of glaciers experienced the largest percentage losses and most of the glaciers’ front position will reach ~5,520 m a.s.l. in RCP 4.5 and 5,570 m a.s.l. in RCP 8.5, the latter of which is nearly close to the DIF average ELA in 1989. The clearly increasing summer air temperature may be the main reason for glacier shrinkage in the DIF. If the warming trend continues, glaciers in DIF may further retreat with continued glacial melt or even mostly disappear by the end of the century.

KEYWORDS:

• Dongkemadi Ice Field
• temperature index model
• glacier mass balance
• climate change
• volume–area scaling method

Acknowledgments

We acknowledge the Chinese National Climate Center for providing data from their regional climate simulation models.

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Additional information

Funding

This research is supported by the China Postdoctoral Science Foundation (Nos. 2017M610622, 2017BSHEDZZ18), the Natural Science Foundation of Shaanxi Province, China (No. 2018JM4008), National Natural Science Foundation of China (Nos. 41571062, 41771030), and Fundamental Research Funds for the Central Universities of Shaanxi Normal University (Nos. GK201703051 and GK201803047).