Snowmelt and Snow Sublimation in the Indus Basin

The Indus basin is considered as the one with the highest dependence on snowmelt runoff in High Mountain Asia. The recent High Mountain Asia snow reanalysis enables to go beyond previous studies by evaluating both snowmelt and snow sublimation at the basin scale. Over 2000-2016, basin-average snowmelt is 101 11 Gt.a-1 (121 ± 13 mm.a-1), which represents about 25-30% of basin-average annual precipitation. Snow sublimation accounts for 11% of the mean annual snow ablation, but with a large spatial variability across the basin.