Modelling glacier change in the Everest region, Nepal Himalaya

Shea, J. M.; Immerzeel, W. W.; Wagnon, P.; Vincent, C.; Bajracharya, S.

doi:https://doi.org/10.5194/tc-9-1105-2015

Articles | Volume 9, issue 3

https://doi.org/10.5194/tc-9-1105-2015

© Author(s) 2015. This work is distributed under
the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 License.

https://doi.org/10.5194/tc-9-1105-2015

© Author(s) 2015. This work is distributed under
the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 License.

Articles | Volume 9, issue 3

Research article

| Highlight paper

|

27 May 2015

Research article | Highlight paper |

| 27 May 2015

Modelling glacier change in the Everest region, Nepal Himalaya

J. M. Shea, W. W. Immerzeel, P. Wagnon, C. Vincent, and S. Bajracharya

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Final revised paper (published on 27 May 2015)
Preprint (discussion started on 17 Oct 2014)

Interactive discussion

Status: closed

AC: Author comment | RC: Referee comment | SC: Short comment | EC: Editor comment

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RC C2204: 'Review of the manuscript "Modelling glacier change in the Everest region, Nepal Himalaya"', Ben Marzeion, 02 Nov 2014
RC C2615: 'Interactive comment on “Modelling glacier change in the Everest region, Nepal Himalaya” by J. M. Shea et al.', Ann Rowan, 10 Dec 2014
SC C2781: 'short comment', Franco Salerno, 25 Dec 2014
AC C3008: 'Responses to Marzeion, Rowan, and Salerno', Joseph Shea, 30 Jan 2015

Peer-review completion

AR: Author's response | RR: Referee report | ED: Editor decision

AR by Joseph Shea on behalf of the Authors (26 Feb 2015) Author's response Manuscript

ED: Referee Nomination & Report Request started (03 Mar 2015) by Tobias Bolch

RR by Ben Marzeion (16 Mar 2015)

Suggestions for revision or reasons for rejection

I am impressed by the amount and detail of additional work the authors have done in response to all the reviewers' questions and suggestions. All the minor comments I had were carefully taken into account, as well as the first and third (of my three) general comments.

The only point that remains a bit unclear to me is the response to my second general comment, regarding the calibration procedure. I now understand that the 20 parameter sets were generated randomly, and I agree that this is better than "handpicking" parameter values. However, I am still not convinced that the calibration is robust. The authors argue that "100 sets would probably reveal the same patterns as 1000"; this may or may not be true - my point is that it probably will be very hard to find any robust patterns with 20 sets. A robust calibration would lead to good performance also in an out-of-sample validation, which is why I suggested that the validation (as described in Sect. 2.5) should be carried out for all 20 of the calibration runs. If this validation is more favorable for the calibration runs with low total scores than for those with high total scores, it would indicate that the calibration is robust; if the runs with low total scores in the calibration don't perform better than the ones with high scores, it would be indicative of overfitting (or at this low number of calibration runs, probably rather of a random result).

If it turns out that the calibration is not robust, I don't think it would break the study - the spread of the 20 calibration runs (e.g. in Fig. 10) would then be a good first indication of the parameter uncertainty. I think it is very useful to know which source of uncertainty is dominant (e.g. parameter uncertainty, scenario uncertainty, ensemble uncertainty, etc.) because it indicates where we perhaps should focus our work.

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ED: Publish subject to minor revisions (Editor review) (25 Mar 2015) by Tobias Bolch

AR by Joseph Shea on behalf of the Authors (07 Apr 2015) Author's response Manuscript

ED: Publish as is (08 Apr 2015) by Tobias Bolch

AR by Joseph Shea on behalf of the Authors (09 Apr 2015) Manuscript

Short summary

A glacier mass balance and redistribution model that integrates field observations and downscaled climate fields is developed to examine glacier sensitivity to future climate in the Everest region of Nepal. The modelled sensitivity of glaciers to future climate change is high, and glacier mass loss is sustained through the 21st century for both middle- and high-emission scenarios. Projected temperature increases will expose large glacier areas to melt and reduce snow accumulations.