On Glacier Energy Balance, Ablation, and Air Temperature

Abstract

The paper tries to reconcile the facts that there are often useful correlations between ablation or run-off and air temperature while net radiation is usually the major source of ablation energy. Equations are derived from the energy balance to describe statistics for the ablation-temperature relation in terms of statistics for the relations between individual energy fluxes and air temperature. As examples, statistics are evaluated for four published series from Arctic Canada. Although the net radiation is the largest energy source in all four cases, the ablation rate is moderately well correlated with temperature and poorly correlated with net radiation. This is because the sensible heat flux is more variable than the radiation in three cases and is itself better correlated with temperature in all four cases. The major contributions to the increase of ablation rate with temperature (on average 6.3 kg m⁻²d⁻¹deg⁻¹) are due to sensible heat, followed by latent heat with a small contribution from net radiation. The resulting ablation-temperature model explains about half the variance of ablation rate. The main application of such a simple model is for the estimation of ablation totals in areas where glaciological and hydrological data are sparse.