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The high mountain regions of Asia contain more glacial ice than anywhere on the planet outside of the polar regions. Because of the large population living in the Indus watershed region who are reliant on melt from these glaciers for fresh water, understanding the factors that affect glacial melt along with the impacts of climate change on the region is important for managing these natural resources. While there are multiple climate data products (e.g., reanalysis and global climate models) available to study the impact of climate change on this region, each product will have a different amount of skill in projecting a given climate variable, such as precipitation. In this research, we develop a spatially varying mixture model to compare the distribution of precipitation in the High Mountain Asia region as produced by climate models with the corresponding distribution from in situ observations from the Asian Precipitation—Highly Resolved Observational Data Integration Towards Evaluation (APHRODITE) data product. Parameter estimation is carried out via a computationally efficient Markov chain Monte Carlo algorithm. Each of the estimated climate distributions from each climate data product is then validated against APHRODITE using a spatially varying Kullback–Leibler divergence measure. Supplementary materials accompanying this paper appear online. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Lakes are key indicators of a region's hydrological cycle, directly reflecting the basin-wide balance between precipitation and evaporation. Lake-level records are therefore valuable repositories of climate history. However, the interpretation of such records is not necessarily straightforward. Lakes act as integrators of the year-to-year fluctuations in precipitation and evaporation that occur even in a constant climate. Therefore lake levels can exhibit natural, unforced fluctuations that persist on timescales of decades or more. This behavior is important to account for when distinguishing between true climate change and interannual variability as the cause of past lake-level fluctuations. We demonstrate the operation of this general principle for the particular case-study of the Great Salt Lake, which has long historical lake-level and climatological records. We employ both full water-balance and linear models. Both models capture the timing and size of the lake's historical variations. We then model the lake's response to much longer synthetic time series of precipitation and evaporation calibrated to the observations, and compare the magnitude and frequency of the modeled response to the Great Salt Lake's historical record. We find that interannual climate variability alone can explain much of the decadal-to-centennial variations in the lake-level record. Further, analytic solutions to the linear model capture much of the full model's behavior, but fail to predict the most extreme lake-level variations. We then apply the models to other lake geometries, and evaluate how the timing and amplitude of a lake-level response differs with climatic and geometric setting. A lake's response to a true climatic shift can only be understood in the context of these expected persistent lake-level variations. On the basis of these results, we speculate that lake response to interannual climate variability may play an important part in explaining much of Holocene lake-level fluctuations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Changes in atmospheric circulation over the past five decades have enhanced the wind-driven inflow of warm ocean water onto the Antarctic continental shelf, where it melts ice shelves from below. Atmospheric circulation changes have also caused rapid warming over the West Antarctic Ice Sheet, and contributed to declining sea-ice cover in the adjacent Amundsen-Bellingshausen seas. It is unknown whether these changes are part of a longer-term trend. Here, we use water-isotope (δ18O) data from an array of ice-core records to place recent West Antarctic climate changes in the context of the past two millennia. We find that the δ18O of West Antarctic precipitation has increased significantly in the past 50 years, in parallel with the trend in temperature, and was probably more elevated during the 1990s than at any other time during the past 200 years. However, δ18O anomalies comparable to those of recent decades occur about 1% of the time over the past 2,000 years. General circulation model simulations suggest that recent trends in δ18O and climate in West Antarctica cannot be distinguished from decadal variability that originates in the tropics. We conclude that the uncertain trajectory of tropical climate variability represents a significant source of uncertainty in projections of West Antarctic climate and ice-sheet change. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]