preprints.org > environmental and earth sciences > atmospheric science and meteorology > doi: 10.20944/preprints202402.0644.v1

Preprint Article Version 1 Preserved in Portico This version is not peer-reviewed

Version 1 : Received: 10 February 2024 / Approved: 12 February 2024 / Online: 13 February 2024 (08:11:35 CET)

Recent satellite measurements of glacier mass balance show mountain glaciers all over the world had generally negative mass balances in the first decades of the 21st century. Mean summer temperatures all over the world rose from 1961-90 to 1991-2020, implying increasingly negative mass balances. We study archived annual balances for 38 Northern Hemisphere glaciers to assess changes within in the 19612020 period. We use a modified doublemass curve to visualize mass balance changes occurring around 1990. Mean balances 196190 were already small negative for many of the studied glaciers and became even more negative in 19912020 for glaciers in the Alps, at high latitudes and in western North America. The largest mass balance changes are for some glaciers in the Alps. We are unable to explain the lack of change in mean balance for one glacier in High Mountain Asia. We find complex changes for eight glaciers in Scandinavia, even including one glacier with positive balance. We explain these changes by visualizing deviations of winter and summer balances from their respective 1961-90 mean values. High winter balances in the 1990s for Scandinavia partly obscured the emerging trend of increasingly negative summer balances, which we expect to continue in the future.

glaciers; mass balance; summer temperature; annual balance; winter balance; summer balance; climate; climate change; doublemass curve

Environmental and Earth Sciences, Atmospheric Science and Meteorology

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