Publication Date:
2023-06-01
Description:
Glaciers are vital to water resources in the arid land of central Asia. Long-term runoff records in the glacierized area are particularly valuable in terms of evaluating glacier recession and water resource change on both a regional and global scale. The runoff records of streams draining basins with 46% current glacier cover, located at the Urumqi Glacier No. 1 in the source area of the Urumqi River in eastern Tianshan, central Asia, were examined for the purpose of assessing climatic and glacial influences on temporal patterns of streamflow for the period 1959–2019. This study has introduced a glacio-hydrologic degree-day model to separate the different hydrologic components in glacier-fed streamflow. Results suggest that runoff from the catchment correlates well with temperature and associated precipitation data. The different ways that the glacier melts in response to temperature versus precipitation in a diurnal scale by changing glacier mass balance can effectively stabilize streamflow, showing a strong capacity of the glacier to naturally adjust streamflow in a beneficial manner to water utilization by those downstream. Based on long-term in-situ observation, we found that the “peak water” of ice melt appeared during the period 1996~2019, which verified the modelling results from previous studies.
Language:
English
Type:
info:eu-repo/semantics/conferenceObject
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