| Brief Communication |
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| Spatial variability of glacial changes and their effects on water resources in the Chinese Tianshan Mountains during the last five decades |
| WANG Puyu1*, LI Zhongqin1,2, HUAI Baojuan1, WANG Wenbin1, LI Huilin1, WANG Lin1 |
1 State Key Laboratory of Cryospheric Sciences/Tianshan Glaciological Station, Cold and Arid Regions Environmental and Engineering Research Institute, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Lanzhou 730000, China;
2 College of Geography and Environmental Science, Northwest Normal University, Lanzhou 730070, China |
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Abstract Changes in glaciers in the Chinese Tianshan Mountains have been analyzed previously. However, most pre-vious studies focused on individual glaciers and/or decentralized glacial basins. Moreover, a majority of these studies were published only in Chinese, which limited their usefulness at the international level. With this in mind, the authors reviewed the previous studies to create an overview of glacial changes in the Chinese Tianshan Mountains over the last five decades and discussed the effects of glacial changes on water resources. In response to climate change, glaciers in the Tianshan Mountains are shrinking rapidly and are ca. 20% smaller on average in the past five decades. Overall, the area reduction of glacial basins in the central part of the Chinese Tianshan Mountains is larger than that in the eastern and western parts. The spatial differentiation in glacial changes are caused by both differences in regional climate and in glacial factors. The effects of glacial changes on water resources vary in different river basins due to the differences in glacier distribution, char-acteristics of glacial change and proportion of the glacier meltwater in river runoff.
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Received: 24 September 2014
Published: 10 December 2015
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| Fund: This work was funded by the Funds for Creative Research Groups of China (41121001), the National Basic Research Pro-gram (2013CBA01801), the National Natural Science Founda-tion of China (41301069, 41471058), the State Key Laboratory of Cryospheric Science foundation, Cold and Arid Regions En-vironmental and Engineering Research Institute, Chinese Acad-emy of Sciences (SKLCS-ZZ-2012-01-01), West Light Program for Talent Cultivation of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, and the Special Financial Grant from the China Postdoctoral Science Foundation ( 2014T70948). |
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