Snow accumulation over the world's glaciers (1981–2021) inferred from climate reanalyses and machine learning
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract. Although reanalysis products for remote high-mountain regions provide estimates of snow precipitation, this data is inherently uncertain and assessing a potential bias is difficult due to the scarcity of observations, thus also limiting their reliability to evaluate long-term effects of climate change. Here, we compare the winter mass balance of 95 glaciers distributed over the Alps, Western Canada, Central Asia and Scandinavia, with the total precipitation from the ERA-5 and the MERRA-2 reanalysis products during the snow accumulation seasons from 1981 until today. We propose a machine learning model to adjust the precipitation of reanalysis products to the elevation of the glaciers, thus deriving snow water equivalent (SWE) estimates over glaciers uncovered by ground observations and/or filling observational gaps. We use a gradient boosting regressor (GBR), which combines several meteorological variables from the reanalyses (e.g. air temperature, relative humidity) with topographical parameters. These GBR-derived estimates are evaluated against the winter mass balance data by means of a leave-one-glacier-out cross-validation (site-independent GBR) and a leave-one-season-out cross-validation (season-independent GBR). Both site-independent and season-independent GBRs allowed reducing (increasing) the bias (correlation) between the precipitation of the original reanalyses and the winter mass balance data of the glaciers. Finally, the GBR models are used to derive SWE trends on glaciers between 1981 and 2021. The resulting trends are more pronounced than those obtained from the total precipitation of the original reanalyses. On a regional scale, significant 41-year SWE trends over glaciers are observed in the Alps (MERRA-2 season-independent GBR: +0.4 %/year) and in Western Canada (ERA-5 season-independent GBR: +0.2 %/year), while significant positive/negative trends are observed in all the regions for single glaciers or specific elevations. Negative (positive) SWE trends are typically observed at lower (higher) elevations, where the impact of rising temperatures is more (less) dominant.
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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 | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 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".