Cooperative Institute for Research in Environmental Sciences

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Estimating the Sea Level Contribution of Glaciers in High Mountain Asia using GRACE

Samuel W. Dorsi (1), R. Steven Nerem (2), Don Chambers (3)

(1) CIRES, Department of Atmospheric and Oceanic Sciences; (2) CIRES, CCAR - Department of Aerospace Engineering (3) Center for Space Research - University of Texas

The great mountain ranges of Asia contain reserves of glacier ice among the largest outside of the Arctic. Glacial meltwater from this region contributes 0.08 mm annually to global mean sea level rise and supplies water for agricultural and economic activities to a vast area including much of India, China and Central Asia. The fraction of this glacial runoff that drains inland to Central Asia is topographically trapped and discharges to landlocked interior termini, where it does not contribute to sea level rise. The Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment (GRACE) enables observation of variations in Earth’s gravity field at monthly intervals and at a spatial scale of several hundred kilometers. We use observations from GRACE to estimate the mass balance of glaciated High Mountain Asia and the internal drainage basins of Central Asia.