Wednesday, April 15, 2009

Journal of Climate paper

A new paper has been accepted for publication in the Journal of Climate titled "Quantifying climate change in the tropical mid troposphere over East Africa from glacier shrinkage on Kilimanjaro" with authors Thomas Mölg, Nicolas Cullen, Douglas Hardy, Michael Winkler, and Georg Kaser. This group has been collaborating for several years; most are part of the Tropical Glaciology Group at the Univerity of Innsbruck.

The paper examines 19th century recession of the southern-slope Kersten Glacier, by backward modeling with a spatially-distributed mass-balance model. Results indicate that late-19th century precipitation was higher by +160 to +240 mm/yr, dominating the mass budget and producing a larger glacier extent. Today, the Kersten Glacier terminus is ~600 m higher in elevation, and the glacier is loosing mass at ~500 kg/m^2/yr.

-Doug Hardy, UMass Geosciences

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