Detection and Attribution of climate change for the glaciers on Kilimanjaro: Targeting the processes at regional and local scales

• Applicant: Professor Dr. Thomas Mölg
• Subject Area: Physical Geography ; Atmospheric Science
• Term: from 2016 to 2024
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 320150769

Human influence on large-scale changes in the atmosphere, oceans, and the cryosphere has increased in recent decades. However, little is known about the physical processes that transfer the human forcing from large to local climate scales, and thus the effects of future climate change in particular regions are hard to evaluate. The scale-dependent transfer problem also applies to glacier loss on mountains. The glaciers on Africa’s highest mountain, Kilimanjaro, have a key role in such a context; their strong shrinkage has become a vital indicator of climate change in Africa, and of the air layers at 5-6 km altitude in the tropical mid-troposphere.This project aims to enhance our knowledge of climate change at high altitude on the process-level. Its major goal is to reveal the mechanisms of human influence on glacier loss on Kilimanjaro across the multitude of space-time scales: from the large-scale climate dynamics, through the regional atmospheric flow over the mountain, down to the local air layers above the glaciers. While a first project laid the basis for selecting skilful global climate simulations for the region, which describe a climate with and without human forcing, the present extension project will focus on the regional and local effects. The selected global climate models, a novel downscaling model, and exceptional in-situ measurements on the glaciers allow us to solve the multi-scale problem in a physically-based way. This will (a) reveal and quantify the dynamical processes that sustain human influence on present glacier mass loss, and (b) identify the “Achilles heels” of the multi-scale system, i.e. the locations and features of the most sensitive feedbacks.The expected results will have significant implications for a broad range of climate sciences. For the understanding of the global climate system, our results will extend the physical basis of surface-troposphere interactions in the tropics. At regional and local scales, the results will benefit climate impact studies for constraining projections of water resources and natural hazards, which are affected by glacier loss. Results will open new directions for local climate impact studies in general, and for paleoclimatology which uses historic glaciations as indicators of past climatic processes.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants