Projected 21st century glacial lake evolution in High Mountain Asia

Introduction

With this dataset, we present estimates for future glacial lake development in High Mountain Asia (HMA) with unprecedented temporal resolution. For the development, we relied on an ensemble of fifteen global climate models using the newest Coupled Model Intercomparison Project phase 6 (CMIP6) data and employed a set of four Shared Socioeconomic Pathway (SSP) scenarios.

The results are a comprehensive overview on spatial and temporal future lake developments in HMA until 2100. They form the basis for more localized approaches to further investigate locations at which a timely formation of hazardous glacial lakes is likely to occur. This dataset can be used to identify a timeframe for the necessary development and implementation of mitigation measures at locations of currently or potentially dangerous glacial lakes.

The related study is part of the GLAMoR project (Future Glacial Lakes in High Mountain Asia - Modeling and Risk Analysis) at the Geography Department of Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin. The results of the study are published in Frontiers in Earth Sciences as part of the Research Topic "Lake Changes, Drivers and Consequences in High Mountain Asia".

Furian W, Maussion F and Schneider C (2022) Projected 21st-Century Glacial Lake Evolution in High Mountain Asia. Front. Earth Sci. 10:821798. doi: 10.3389/feart.2022.821798

Ressources

This study builds on several resources and previously published datasets:

• the Open Global Glacier Model (OGGM) for the glacier modeling
• the specific OGGM outputs used in our study available here
• glacier outlines from the Randolph Glacier Inventory
• the inventory of subglacial overdeepenings in HMA (by Furian et al., 2021)

Improving the dataset

Please use the Issues section to report any errors. If you would like to share your own improvements to the code or the shapefiles, please fork the repository, commit your changes, and file a merge request.

Citation

You are free to use this code and dataset in your research. If you do, please refer to the release you used, e.g., for v1.01:

Furian, Wilhelm (2022): Projected 21st century glacial lake evolution in High Mountain Asia. A dataset in shapefile format. v1.01. Zenodo. DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.6024450