抄録
Water from small glaciers and ice caps are sensitive against the ongoing global climate change. However, previous researches have been estimated current water resources from glaciers based on areaweight method of available mass balance observations. It is therefore difficult to estimate the future volume change of glaciers due to the lack of available data. This paper reports our latest effort to develop a global glacier model that can be coupled with global hydrological and land surface models by including individual glacier inventory data in a distributed way. Simulation result over European small glaciers showed that the newly developed model successfully replicates average mass balance obtained from available observation-based estimates, indicating the advantage of new model which includes detail location and area distribution of glacier inventories, comparing to the original glacier model assuming one large glacier within each 0.5-degree grid. Sensitivity test revealed that the calculation excluding small glaciers within 0.5-degree grid in a random manner shows similar mass changes, indicating the potential method to save calculation cost of the new model. Preliminary experiment using warming climate scenario by a climate model showed that the new model has lower climate sensitivity than that of the previous model due to the loss of small glaciers at low altitude.
