High Elevation Energy and Water Balance: the Roles of Surface Albedo and Temperature

Observation and modeling of the coupled energy and water balance is the key to understand hydrospheric and cryospheric processes at high elevation. The paper summarizes the progress to address this aspect in relation with different earth system elements, from glaciers to wetlands. The energy budget of two glaciers, i.e. Xiao Dongkemadi and Parlung No.4, was studied by means of extended field measurements and a distributed model of the coupled energy and mass balance was developed and evaluated. The need for accurate characterization of surface albedo was further documented for the entire Qinghai Tibet Plateau by numerical experiments with Weather Research and Forecast (WRF) on the sensitivity of the atmospheric boundary layer to the parameterization of land surface processes. A new approach to the calibration of a coupled distributed watershed model of the energy and water balance was demonstrated by a case study on the Heihe River Basin in northwestern China. The assimilation of land surface temperature did lead to the retrieval of critical soil and vegetation properties as the soil permeability and the canopy resistance to the exchange of vapour and carbon dioxide. The retrievals of actual Evapo-Transpiration (ET) were generated by the ETMonitor system and evaluated against eddy covariance measurements at sites spread throughout Asia. As regards glacier response to climate variability, the combined findings based on satellite data and model experiments showed that the spatial variability of surface albedo and temperature is significant and controls both glacier mass balance and flow. Experiments with both atmospheric and hydrosphere-cryosphere models documented the need and advantages of using accurate retrievals of land surface albedo to capture lan-atmosphere interactions at high elevation.