Mid-Term Madness

Reading week is over, and we here at the MOSH lab are gearing up for spring/summer research and conference presentations. Sara will be presenting her work at the Western Snow Conference in Whistler, BC at the end of April, and Sergio will be heading to Banff, AB to present at the Canadian Geophysical Union meeting.

The Cryosphere chapter from the Hindu Kush Himalayan Assessment, co-authored by MOSH lead Joseph Shea was recently recognized as a top highlight of 2019 by Springer Nature: https://www.springernature.com/gp/researchers/campaigns/highlights/climate —> Book Chapter

It’s already been downloaded over 35,000 times, so a huge shoutout to all the contributors!

New Postdoc! And Its Snowing!

The MOSH Lab welcomes Anna Chesnokova as the postdoc on our Mitacs-funded snow project. Anna is completing her PhD at Ecole de Technologie Superieur (ETS; Montreal) and will be joining us in March.

We are excited to announce that it is snowing! We will be setting up a demonstration station at our local cross-country facility, and measuring real-time snow surface temperatures for all the competitive skiers (and recreational skiers looking for that extra edge). Stay tuned for a link to the setup, the online data, and our initial results.

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Fall 2019

A big MOSH lab welcome to Sara Darychuk, who starts her MSc program as part of the Mitacs-funded Snow Water Equivalence Estimation Project (SWEEP). She will be working with LiDAR based snow depth data and remote sensing products to improve estimates of SWE in mountain basins. \m/

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Himalayan Glaciers and Climate Change in the News

I was recently asked to comment on the new Science paper by Maurer et al on rates of glacier mass loss in the Himalayas. The paper is a great example of an expanded analysis that builds on previously developed techniques. The authors use declassified spy satellite imagery to create 1970’s era elevation models of glaciers along a 2000 km transect of the Himalayas. By comparing these with contemporary elevation models they are able to demonstrate that rates of glacier mass loss have doubled between 1970-2000 and 2000-2018. Based on the coherent signal of change between periods they also suggest that it can only be due to increased temperatures.

My comments appeared in a number of places, including:

What’s really encouraging to me is that our synthesis chapter on the status of the cryosphere in the Hindu Kush Himalaya (Bolch et al.) showed similar rates and acceleration of glacier mass loss, but was based on published mass balance rates (glaciological and geodetic). Our averaged rates of mass loss pre-2000 and post-2000, compared with Maurer et al:

Pre-2000 mass loss (m w.e.): -0.22 (Maurer) // -0.26 (Bolch et al.)

Post-2000 mass loss (m w.e.): -0.43 (Maurer) // -0.37 (Bolch et al.)

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New Graduate Students!

A big MOSH lab welcome to Sara Darychuk and Kevin Ostapowich! Sara will start her M.Sc. research in September 2019, and is currently working with the British Columbia Ministry of Forests, Lands, and Natural Resource Development. Kevin will start his MOSH M.Sc. research in January 2020, though he may get into the field a bit sooner than that....

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