High Mountain Asia

Augmenting daily MODIS LST with AIRS surface temperature retrievals to estimate ground temperature and permafrost extent in High Mountain Asia

Permafrost in High Mountain Asia (HMA) is becoming increasingly vulnerable to thaw due to climate change. However, the lack of either in situ ground surface or borehole temperature data beyond the Tibetan Plateau prevents comprehensive assessments of …

Mapping proglacial headwater streams in High Mountain Asia using PlanetScope imagery

Headwater streams transport nutrients, sediment, and mineral-rich groundwater downstream. In High Mountain Asia (HMA), headwater streams also funnel glacier and snow melt to sustain continuous water supply for the downstream region. These channels …

An assessment of gridded precipitation products over High Mountain Asia

Study region High Mountain Asia Study focus The study assesses five high-resolution gridded precipitation products against observations taken at twenty-seven weather stations across High Mountain Asia (HMA), one of the world's most complex and data …

Connecting Global Modes of Variability to Climate in High Mountain Asia

Oscillations in global modes of variability (MoVs) form global teleconnections that affect regional climate variability and modify the potential for severe and damaging weather conditions. Understanding the link between certain MoVs and regional …

Diverging Trends in Rain-On-Snow Over High Mountain Asia

Rain-on-snow (ROS) over snow-dominated regions such as High Mountain Asia (HMA) modulates snowmelt and runoff and is key contributor in influencing water availability and hazards (e.g., floods and landslides). We studied the trends in ROS in HMA over …

Distributional Validation of Precipitation Data Products with Spatially Varying Mixture Models

The high mountain regions of Asia contain more glacial ice than anywhere on the planet outside of the polar regions. Because of the large population living in the Indus watershed region who are reliant on melt from these glaciers for fresh water, …

On the Relevance of Aerosols to Snow Cover Variability Over High Mountain Asia

While meteorology and aerosols are identified as key drivers of snow cover (SC) variability in High Mountain Asia, complex non-linear interactions between them are not adequately quantified. Here, we attempt to unravel these interactions through a …

Passive Microwave Brightness Temperature Assimilation to Improve Snow Mass Estimation Across Complex Terrain in Pakistan, Afghanistan, and Tajikistan

An ensemble Kalman filter is used to assimilate Advanced Microwave Scanning Radiometer-2 (AMSR2) observations of passive microwave (PMW) brightness temperatures (spectral differences, ΔTb) into land surface model estimates of snow mass over …

Quantifying parameter uncertainty in a large-scale glacier evolution model using Bayesian inference: application to High Mountain Asia

The response of glaciers to climate change has major implications for sea-level change and water resources around the globe. Large-scale glacier evolution models are used to project glacier runoff and mass loss, but are constrained by limited …

Changes in Extreme Precipitation and Landslides Over High Mountain Asia

High Mountain Asia is impacted by extreme monsoonal rainfall that triggers landslides in large proportions relative to global distributions, resulting in substantial human impacts and damage to infrastructure each year. Previous landslide research …