Global Overview


Project’s context, positioning and objectives

Mountain glaciers are major contributors to sea level rise. In comparison with the Greenland and the Antarctic ice sheets, they respond quickly to climate change, in particular because of high ablation rates and specific accumulation processes (IPCC, 2019). Over the 21st century, glaciers are expected to contribute to one fourth of the sea level rise with contributions of +10 cm (4-16 cm) in a low-emission scenario (RCP2.6) and 16 cm (9-23 cm) in a large-emission scenario (RCP8.5). The (…)

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State of the art

Accounting for the different feedbacks described in the above section and physical processes implied in the future rain/snow transition rise requires to rely on complex models of SMB, and major improvements in glacier SMB projections can be achieved by focusing on the accumulation processes and modelling. State-of-the-art glacier models are in their vast majority relatively simple (Marzeion et al., 2020). They calculate glacier SMB with empirical relations between monthly or annual (…)

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Organisation of the project

Global assessment of the future evolution of glaciers is currently done with the above-mentioned limitations (poor knowledge of precipitation, glacier surface processes poorly taken into account). We hypothesize that the rain/snow transition has a very large impact on the future glacier evolution, yet not addressed by state-of-theart glacier models (Johnson & Rupper, 2020). The iFROG project aims at testing this hypothesis, and overcoming current limitations, through three specific (…)

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