Abstract ID: 3.12217 | Accepted as Talk | Talk/Oral | TBA | TBA

Alpine glaciers play a critical role in year-round water resource management, influencing flooding events, drinking water resources, and base-load capable green energy production. Their rapid melting contributes to global sea-level rise and is an important marker of ongoing climate change. For precise predictions of glacier responses to evolving climatic conditions, it is imperative to have a detailed description of the glacier boundary layer and understand the intricate interplay between micro-to-synoptic scale atmospheric processes. This comprehensive understanding allows for more accurate modeling of glacier behavior under changing climatic scenarios. However, simulating these multiscale atmospheric processes with traditional numerical models demands significant computational resources, leading to limitations in spatial resolution, domain size, and run-time, neglecting crucial small-scale atmospheric processes. This study aims to investigate the thermal wind driven glacier microclimate and its impact on the glacier’s surface energy balance by utilizing the High-Resolution Intermediate Complexity Atmospheric Research (HICAR) model forced with COSMO1 data. HICAR has proven effective in downscaling conventional numerical models, forcing data to hectometer resolutions, and resolving topographically induced effects on the atmospheric boundary layer. HICARsnow has been further enhanced by coupling the Factorial Snow Model 2 oshd variant (FSM2trans), incorporating modules for snow redistribution. The high efficiency of the model facilitates the investigation of microclimate evolution in the time frame of entire seasons. It also allows for a significant increase in vertical and horizontal resolution. With this, HICARsnow now resolves small-scale processes that are essential to the glacier microclimate, as e.g. the katabatic glacier winds. By calculating seasonal snow dynamics, we gain insights into the intricate interplay between the glacier’s spatially and temporally varying surface characteristics, such as surface roughness and albedo, and the processes within the near-surface boundary layer. This analysis provides a deeper understanding of how these factors influence the dynamics of snow accumulation and glacier melt. Simulations are conducted for two alpine glaciers, Hintereisferner and Silvretta glacier, sites of various experimental studies on glacier microclimate, including HEFEX I and II. Experimental data are employed to validate the simulation results, testing their fidelity and reliability.