Completed Projects
Peak Water in High Mountain Asia (2020-2024)
Glacier runoff in High Mountain Asia is projected to reach a maximum in the middle of the century and decline thereafter. The timing and amount of this “peak water” has significant implications for the more than 1 billion people relying on this water for their livelihood. In order to understand these impacts we need a clear picture of when and where glaciers will change and how those changes influence downstream availability of water resources. This NASA-funded project sought to understand and quantify how glacier runoff interacts with the hydrologic system and to assess the impact on past, present and future regional water availability for all basins relying on HMA glacier runoff. Through collaborations with the University of Washington, University of New Hampshire, and University of Alaska Fairbanks, we produced new high-resolution remote sensing measurements to advance our understanding of glacier dynamics and surface mass balance processes and used these data to inform a large-scale glacier evolution model (i.e., the Python Glacier Evolution Model). Glacier runoff was used an input to a large scale hydrological model (i.e., the Water Balance Model) to quantify how changes in glacier runoff affected downstream users.