The Fifth Assessment Report (AR5) of the IPCC identified that the glacier loss in "Low Latitudes regions", which include Bolivia, is the most significant during the last several decades. Therefore, a physically-based regional modeling approach of climate change related snow storage variations for these region is desirable. However, snow models in the field of hydrologic engineering have barely incorporated the long-term effects of inter-annual snow storage variations because the time scale of glacier dynamics is much longer than that of river flow and seasonal snowmelt. This study treats inland glaciers as systems in dynamic equilibrium that stay constant under a static climate condition. The snow/ice vertical movement from high to low elevation areas is considered as an equilibrator of the glacier system as it promotes snow/ice ablation. The challenges of regional energy balance modeling of such a dynamic equilibrium snow system will be discussed in this presentation. The developed model has been coupled with a mesoscale numerical weather model (WRF) to compute the snow surface energy balance.
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