Mass balances of Yala and Rikha Samba glaciers, Nepal, from 2000 to 2017

Stumm, Dorothea; Joshi, Sharad Prasad; Gurung, Tika Ram; Silwal, Gunjan

doi:https://doi.org/10.5194/essd-13-3791-2021

Articles | Volume 13, issue 8

https://doi.org/10.5194/essd-13-3791-2021

© Author(s) 2021. This work is distributed under
the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License.

https://doi.org/10.5194/essd-13-3791-2021

© Author(s) 2021. This work is distributed under
the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License.

Articles | Volume 13, issue 8

Data description paper

|

06 Aug 2021

Data description paper |

| 06 Aug 2021

Mass balances of Yala and Rikha Samba glaciers, Nepal, from 2000 to 2017

Dorothea Stumm, Sharad Prasad Joshi, Tika Ram Gurung, and Gunjan Silwal

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Final revised paper (published on 06 Aug 2021)
Supplement to the final revised paper
Preprint (discussion started on 17 Nov 2020)
Supplement to the preprint

Interactive discussion

Status: closed

AC: Author comment | RC: Referee comment | SC: Short comment | EC: Editor comment

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RC1: 'Comments on "Mass balances of Yala and Rikha Samba Glacier, Nepal from 2000 to 2017"', Argha Banerjee, 25 Dec 2020
- AC1: 'Reply on RC1', Dorothea Stumm, 18 Apr 2021
RC2: 'Review of manuscript “Mass balances of Yala and Rikha Samba…” by Stumm et al.', Anonymous Referee #2, 07 Feb 2021
- AC2: 'Reply on RC2', Dorothea Stumm, 18 Apr 2021

Peer-review completion

AR: Author's response | RR: Referee report | ED: Editor decision

AR by Dorothea Stumm on behalf of the Authors (19 Apr 2021) Author's response Author's tracked changes Manuscript

ED: Referee Nomination & Report Request started (25 Apr 2021) by Reinhard Drews

RR by Anonymous Referee #2 (12 May 2021)

Suggestions for revision or reasons for rejection

Overall assessment of re-submission:

The authors made a great, if not exceptional, effort to answer the reviewers' questions in great detail, which eventually resulted in a substantial reformulation of large parts of the manuscript incl. changes made to Figures. There is also a largely extended supplementary section. With that, the manuscript is very comprehensive, and I do not see what else needs to be added.

As the underlying data is key for the present paper, I should also mention that the presentation of the data and their availability is now very clearly described in the paper (this point was brought up by both reviewers that assessed the first version of the paper). Another point referred to the extrapolation of the glacier mass balance to higher elevations, which the authors carefully addressed with a dedicated separate section.

Overall, the paper is very comprehensive and it includes really all (or nearly all) aspects that are relevant when assessing glaciological mass balances and especially when implementing a (new) glaciological mass-balance programme. The Introduction offers many references to other studies; it is almost a complete overview on previous (glaciological) work for the particular study region, which is rather long but I think it will also be useful for other studies, too. The following description of the study site and its climate is written very carefully (the sub-section on climate is very comprehensive, but it will be useful for readers who are less familiar with the region). Presentation of results and their discussion are very clear, and there is extensive supplementary material referred to. Finally, I think the new Recommendations section will be very useful, too.

In addition, I also noticed the following points that could be addressed before final publication:

Line 12: you could first list the mass balance and then the length changes, as the main focus of the paper is on (glaciological) mass balance.

Line 15: It is not quite evident why there are two different observation periods for Yala Glacier (2000-2012 and 2011-2017), which also partly overlap (or maybe do not overlap, because the second period is actually 2011/12-2016/17 (?).

Line 18/19: “mass-balance rates”

Line 26: The new FoG database version will be 2021-05 and it should appear very soon on the WGMS doi landing page (you may check here: https://wgms.ch/data_databaseversions/)

Line 30: Good and interesting that you refer to the WMO(GCOS) headline indicators.

Line 32: You could also refer to Gärtner-Roer et al. 2019 (Worldwide assessment of national glacier monitoring and future perspectives, MRD, 39, A1-A11) about the national implementation of the glacier monitoring strategy.

Line 45: I would just write “glaciers” and not “clean glaciers”. If you want to use the term “clean” in this context, you would have to first explain what you exactly mean. On the other hand, it would open many other questions., e.g. what about glaciers that are partly debris-covered, and how would this affect the glaciological mass balance.

Line 110: There is a kind of break in here, maybe you could link this last paragraph more to the previous Introduction.

Line 113/114: Not fully clear; what do you mean with “other supporting data beyond the scope of the WGMS FoG database”?

Figure 1 is very useful for the broader context, incl. the overview map showing the location of other glaciers with mass-balance measurements.
You could add the date of the glacier outlines (= the same as the satellite image?).

Line 292: Sentence is logically not fully clear, as the DEM is part of the geodetic method (?). Or is it an additional DEM that you are referring to?

Line 320/21: You could explicitly state that Wagnon et al. used this methodology on Mera and Pokhalde glaciers.

Line 535: there is some repetition in this paragraph, when compared to the beginning of this section.

Line 604: “Yala Glacier will disappear”

Line 663: The conclusions of this discussion (about glacier length, flow, and downwasting) remains a bit elusive: Do you mean that there is a bias in the mass-balance measurements? I read in this paragraph that the detailed topographical analyses (length, flow, downwasting) are useful to better assess the mass-balance measurements. But this could be mentioned more explicitly.

Line 695: rather “Fujita and Nuimura (2011) found that…”

Line 746: or: debris-free

Line 817: maybe reformulate this sub-title; the in situ measurements will always remain the same, but the mass balance will be extrapolated to regions without in situ measurements.

Line 854: Not fully clear: I understood that the glacier-wide mass balance is given for the entire glacier as shown in Figure 1. Hence, there is a quantification for these slopes (as long as they are in the respective glacier area/outline?), but this extrapolation (which nevertheless represents a quantification) may have a certain error. It is also a bit confusing because line 855 says that this error (underestimation of ablation) can be addressed with the geodetic method, which was actually done in the presented study. Or was the applied DEM not sufficient enough (as the following sentence might suggest?).

Line 872: “on the following points”

Line 1205: Wagnon et al. 2020 is listed twice (it must be an important paper :-) )

Line 1220: The WGMS (2020a) reference might be replaced with WGMS (2021), because the 2021 database version also includes all data of the 2020 version, and hence you can just refer to the latest database version. (Unless you explicitly want to refer to some data that were in the 2020 database but are not any more or that have changed in the 2021 version; but I think, this (rare) case does not apply here). WGMS (2020b) would then be WGMS (2020).

Further point that I have noticed:
Usage of three nouns: for mass-balance rate or mass-balance monitoring etc., they are usually written with hyphen (not quite with all occurrences in the text), but other word combinations are written without (e.g. sea level rise).

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RR by Argha Banerjee (21 May 2021)

ED: Publish subject to minor revisions (review by editor) (22 May 2021) by Reinhard Drews

AR by Dorothea Stumm on behalf of the Authors (11 Jun 2021) Author's response Author's tracked changes Manuscript

ED: Publish subject to technical corrections (28 Jun 2021) by Reinhard Drews

Dear Authors,

Thank you for your revisions in response to the re-review. Both reviewers have positively evaluated this version of the paper. I agree with their evaluation and accept the paper for ESSD. Congratulations. I complement you for a detailed response-to-review which treated the reviewer’s comments with much respect.

In my re-read of the paper I found some smaller issues that require attention, but most those can be hopefully dealt with straightforwardly.

Kind regards & congratulations,
-- Reinhard Drews

l 42. “misinformation” is pretty strong wording referring to IPPC AR4. Maybe “overstating” ? Also, what’s the point of citing an old IPCC report, what happened to this statement in the fifth report? I think this sentenced can be removed without much loss of information. If you insist on maintaining it include the latest IPPC report.

Fig 1b include scalebar in legend.

l. 235 I don’t quite understand how snow compaction can “push” a stake up.

l. 262 remove “so-called” (also elsewhere. I am never quite sure what this adds.)

l. 383 If GPS data from 2012 are available, why weren’t they used as GCPs in Section 3.3?

l. 423 SRTM 3 has an accuracy of plus minus 16 m (l. 274) and was used as GCP to offset the stereographic DEM. I am not sure how this uncertainty can then melt down to 7.4 m.

Fig 2 Label panels with (a)-(d). Replace this with description “far left”.

Fig 4/13 add x-axis label “years”

Fig 7 I could be wrong but I suspect that at least some of this thickness change is due to the pm 16 m of SRTM uncertainty.

Fig7 I suggest to divide the thickness difference by the 8 year time period to get “per year” thickness change which is a quantity more familiar for most.

L 540 there is a “per year” missing after “-3.8 m”

Fig S1 insert “months of the year” as x-label

S2 define if you refer to horizontal or vertical dGNSS accuracy.

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AR by Dorothea Stumm on behalf of the Authors (05 Jul 2021) Author's response Manuscript

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Short summary

Glacier mass change data are valuable as a climate indicator and help to verify simulations of glaciological and hydrological processes. Data from the Himalaya are rare; hence, we established monitoring programmes on two glaciers in the Nepal Himalaya. We measured annual mass changes on Yala and Rikha Samba glaciers from 2011 to 2017 and calculated satellite-based mass changes from 2000 to 2012 for Yala Glacier. Both glaciers are shrinking, following the general trend in the Himalayas.