Estimating glacier ice thickness and snow accumulation

In this thesis, two new approaches are proposed for the inference of two distributed glaciological variables of difficult access: ice-thickness and accumulation distribution. A first method is proposed for inferring the ice-thickness distribution based on the principle of mass conservation and considerations on the ice-flow mechanics. The method is applied to a set of glaciers in the Swiss Alps and the results are used to calibrate a volume-area scaling relation. A second approach is proposed for inferring the distribution of snow accumulation by combining time-lapse photography and simple modeling. Although their simplicity, both methods perform surprisingly well when compared to direct measurements and show therefor the potential for a large number of applications.

Autorentext

Daniel Farinotti ist gebürtiger Tessiner und studierte Umweltingenieurwissenschaften an der ETH Zürich. Seit 2007 Mitarbeiter derGlaziologiegruppe an der Versuchsanstalt für Wasserbau, Hydrologie undGlaziologie (VAW) der ETH Zürich, untersucht er heute hauptsächlich denEinfluss des Klimawandels auf die Hydrologie Alpiner Einzugsgebiete.