Forrest Schoessow
Building a database for investigating climate-glacier changes in the Cordillera Blanca, Peru using measures collected from space to summit
Friday, March 5th: 4:15 - 5:00 P.M.
Across the tropical Andes, accelerating glacier mass losses have broad and direct impacts downstream. Glacier mass change projections provide critical information required to inform water management and assess emerging geohazard risks. However, because low-latitude glaciers exist solely in high-altitude, inaccessible mountain environments, a lack of systematic climate-glacier observations has impeded tropical climate-glacier model calibration and validation as well as our understanding of potentially amplified warming at higher elevations. To help address these high-altitude knowledge gaps, I am developing a novel timeseries database describing annual changes in glacio-geomorphological variables at five representative catchments in the Cordillera Blanca, Peru, between 1984-2020 that combines direct, remote, and historical measures. This database will enable me to calibrate and test climate-glacier linkages and improve future change projections.