Modeling Spatiotemporal Precipitation Variability and Glacier Mass Balance in High Mountain Asia

With the exception of the earth's polar regions, the High Mountain Asia region (including the Tibetan Plateau) contains more of the world's perennial glaciers than any other. Sometimes called the "third pole" because of its massive storage of ice, High Mountain Asia (HMA) provides water to one-fth of the world's population. Due to changes in precipitation patterns and temperatures warming faster in HMA than the global average, the region faces increased risk of flooding, crop damage, mudslides, economic instability, and long-term water shortages for the communities down-river. In this talk, we discuss a large, interdisciplinary, multi-institutional research project for characterizing climate change in HMA. We illustrate statistical approaches for extracting consensus estimates of spatiotemporally-correlated climate processes from a suite of climate model outputs and remote-sensing observations, and we discuss the uncertainty quantification needed to inform probability-based decision making.

reese@stat.byu.edu