GABY – VASA
Funding
BMBF-funding registration number for NiGAnd: 01DN15007
Project duration: May 2015 to April 2018
Climate and Glacier Changes in Patagonia
Responses of Glaciers, Biosphere and Hydrology to Climate Variability and Climate Change across the Southern Andes
Glacier Retreat
The changes of the two outlet glaciers of the Patagonian ice sheets in southern South America rank among the most significant glacier retreats worldwide. South of the Strait of Magellan, in the Cordillera Darwin, the glacier retreat has been slower during the last decades.
Our Project – GABY VASA
Our project GABY-VASA focused on climate impacts on surface energy and mass balance of the glaciers as well as impacts on surrounding forest ecosystems. For our research we studied two sites: 1) Glaciar Schiaparelli in the Cordillera Darwin and 2) Glaciar Grey in the Torres del Paine national park in Chile, which is part of the South Patagonian ice sheet.
Our Subproject – NiGAnd
The subproject NiGAnd of RWTH Aachen and HU Berlin includes the implementation of the "COupled Snowpack and Ice surface energy and MAss balance model" COSIMA (Huintjes et al. 2015). It models the spatial destribution of surface mass balane and parameters of calving events at the study sites. Additionally, we collected measurement data and analyzed remote sensing data. The field work at Glaciar Schiaparelli and Glaciar Grey included meteorological, glaciological, and dendrochronological measurements. Therefore, we installed automatic weather stations, recorded time-lapses and measured ablation and GPR.
| RWTH Aachen |
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| HU Berlin |
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| FAU Erlangen-Nürnberg |
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| Universidad de Magallanes, Chile |
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| Instituto Antártico Chileno, Chile |
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