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Centennial glacier retreat as categorical evidence of regional climate change

By: Gerard Roe, Professor, University of Washington

Click for a live broadcast: https://mediasite.jsg.utexas.edu/UTMediasite/Play/a7160b23c18e485b963344611634b3651d

Abstract
The near-global retreat of glaciers over the last century provides some of the most iconic imagery for communicating the reality of anthropogenic climate change to the public. Surprisingly, however, there has not been a quantitative foundation for attributing the retreats to climate change, except in the global aggregate. This gap, between public perception and scientific basis, is due to uncertainties in numerical modeling and the short length of glacier mass-balance records. Here we present a method for assessing individual glacier change based on the signal-to-noise ratio, a robust metric that is insensitive to uncertainties in glacier dynamics. Using only meteorological and glacier observations, and the characteristic decadal response time of glaciers, we demonstrate that observed retreats of individual glaciers represent some of the highest signal to-noise ratios of climate change yet documented. Therefore, in many places, the centennial-scale retreat of the local glaciers does indeed constitute categorical evidence of climate change.

Host: Ginny Catania/Charles Jackson, UTIG

When: Fri Feb 3, 2017 11:30am – 12:30pm Central Time