A preliminary assessment of glacier melt-model parameter sensitivity and transferability in a dry subarctic environment
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract. Efforts to project the long-term melt of mountain glaciers and ice-caps require that melt models developed and calibrated for well studied locations be transferable over large regions. Here we assess the sensitivity and transferability of parameters within several commonly used melt models for two proximal sites in a dry subarctic environment of northwestern Canada. The models range in complexity from a classical degree-day model to a simplified energy-balance model. Parameter sensitivity is first evaluated by tuning the melt models to the output of an energy balance model forced with idealized inputs. This exercise allows us to explore parameter sensitivity both to glacier geometric attributes and surface characteristics, as well as to meteorological conditions. We then investigate the effect of model tuning with different statistics, including a weighted coefficient of determination (wR2), the Nash-Sutcliffe efficiency criterion (E), mean absolute error (MAE) and root mean squared error (RMSE). Finally we examine model parameter transferability between two neighbouring glaciers over two melt seasons using mass balance data collected in the St. Elias Mountains of the southwest Yukon. The temperature-index model parameters appear generally sensitive to glacier aspect, mean surface elevation, albedo, wind speed, mean annual temperature and temperature lapse rate. The simplified energy balance model parameters are sensitive primarily to snow albedo. Model tuning with E, MAE and RMSE produces similar, or in some cases identical, parameter values. In twelve tests of spatial and/or temporal parameter transferability, the results with the lowest RMSE values with respect to ablation stake measurements were achieved twice with a classical temperature-index (degree-day) model, three times with a temperature-index model in which the melt parameter is a function of potential radiation, and seven times with a simplified energy-balance model. A full energy-balance model produced better results than the other models in nine of twelve cases, though the tuning of this model differs from that of the others.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.005 | 0.014 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".