Himalaya water resources - the role of snow and ice

Professor Asgeir Sorteberg
Geophysical Institute, University of Bergen

How important are glaciers for Himalayan water resources? Looking into the literature reveals a wide range of estimates to this question. They partly diverge because of different definitions of a 'water resource' and partly due to the different estimates of the contribution from the glaciers.

I will present estimates of water resources from non-glaciated and glaciated regions of the Indus. For the non-glaciated regions we use a wide range of estimates from observationally based, reanalysis and land data assimilation systems.

Our results indicate large differences between the different estimates even for the annual values averaged over large watersheds. The implication of this finding is that the large uncertainties in the water resources of the non-glaciated regions will prevent us from making narrow estimates of the importance of the glaciers. For estimating the contribution from the glaciers I will present a few different methods which gives different results. Most methods indicate that glacier melt is not playing an important role as a water resource in Indus.

Key uncertainties in estimating Indus water resources are the lack of mountainous observations of precipitation. While the rate of sublimation from the glacier is a key factor in estimating how much of the glacier loss that actually becomes river runoff and therefore can be regarded as a water resource.

This is a Network Talk organised by ResHim at UiB Global.

All are welcome!