Scientists' observations in the Karakoram region have revealed that the glaciers there were stable, and snowfall is increasing instead of decreasing.
The researchers found that while precipitation is increasing across
the Himalayas, most of this moisture drops in the summer — except in
Karakoram, where snow dominates the scene, Discovery News reported.
Study researcher Sarah Kapnick, a postdoctoral researcher in
atmospheric and ocean sciences at Princeton University, gave reasoning
for why you can have increased snowfall in a region and have increased
glaciers or stable glaciers in a warming world.
She and her colleagues collected data on recent precipitation and
temperatures from the Pakistan Meteorological Department and other
sources, including satellite data. They combined this information with
climate models to track changes in three regions of the Himalayas
between 1861 and 2100: the Karakoram; the central Himalayas; and the
southeast Himalayas which included part of the Tibetan Plateau.
The researchers found that a new model that simulates climate down
to an area of 965 square miles (2,500 square kilometers) was able to
match the observed temperature and precipitation cycles seen in the
Karakoram. A model used by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change
(IPCC) to simulate what will happen if the world continues to emit
greenhouse gases at current rates was unable to capture these seasonal
cycles, Kapnick said.
The reason, she said, was that the IPCC and other climate models are
lower-resolution, capturing climate change over areas no finer than
about 17,027 square miles (44,100 square km). The coarser resolution
"smoothes out" variations in elevation that works fine for the central
Himalayas and southeast Himalayas. However, the Karakoram region has
more elevation variability than the other two regions.
Ultimately, the result is that the IPCC and other models overestimate the amount of warmth in this region, Kapnick said.
