ACINN Graduate Seminar - SS 2025

2025-04-30 at 12:00 (on-line and on-site)

Data assimilation in global glacier modelling

Patrick Schmitt

ACINN, University of Innsbruck, Austria

 

Mountain glaciers play an important role in the Earth's water systems. As they shrink and lose ice around the world, they cause sea levels to rise and create problems for water supply, hydropower, farming, and the management of natural disasters. To better deal with these issues, we need predictions from dynamic glacier models. New Earth observation data, such as geodetic glacier mass balance, outlines, and ice velocity, provide helpful information to improve global glacier models. However, combining different types of data into one dynamically consistent model framwork is still very difficult.

In this seminar, I discuss the challenges of using data in global glacier modeling and present results from a recent study in the Ötztal and Stubai mountain ranges. In this study, we updated the data assimilation method of the Open Global Glacier Model to include high-resolution, multitemporal observational data. This new method is a major improvement over earlier regional approaches. Still, it is designed for specific data and cannot easily handle other kinds of information. To address this, we are creating the Open Global Glacier Data Assimilation Framework (AGILE), and I will share some of our first promising results.

 

 

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