Modelling Glacier Mass Balance and Runoff in the Kaskawulsh River Headwaters of Southwest Yukon, Canada, 1980–2022
Bibliographic record
Abstract
ABSTRACT The highly‐glacierized headwaters of the Kaskawulsh River is home to 9% of all glacier ice in Yukon, Canada, and was the source of a sudden meltwater‐rerouting event in 2016 that has had significant downstream consequences. We use a distributed mass‐balance model driven by downscaled and bias‐corrected climate reanalysis data that incorporates observations of sub‐debris melt, accumulation, and transient snowline positions to estimate the 1980–2022 glacier mass balance, discharge, and water budget of the Kaskawulsh River headwaters. We estimate a catchment‐wide cumulative mass loss of 18.02 Gt over 1980–2022 (−0.38 ± 0.15 m w.e. a−1) and a mean annual discharge of ~60 m3 s−1, 25% of which originates from non‐renewable glacier wastage. The water budget is dominated by glacier ice melt, accounting for 61% of mean annual discharge, followed by snowmelt at 31%, rainfall at 6%, and melt from refrozen ice layers at 2%. Extreme negative and positive mass‐balance years produce the largest perturbations in glacier ice melt contributions to the water budget, ranging from a maximum of 67% following negative years to a minimum of 53% in positive years. Trend detection using the Mann‐Kendall test shows that catchment‐wide annual discharge increased by 3.9 m3 s−1 per decade from 1980 to 2022, with statistically significant contributions from glacier ice melt (2.8 m3 s−1 per decade) and rainfall (0.5 m3 s−1 per decade). Increasing air temperatures and declining spring snowfall have lead to seasonally accelerated snowline retreat, earlier ice exposure, and earlier onset of net ablation in the catchment at a rate of ~5 days per decade. Based on summer air temperatures projected by CMIP6 and the empirical sensitivities of modelled runoff we calculate for 1980–2022, we hypothesise a more than doubling of annual runoff from this catchment by 2080–2100. This result, combined with a decrease in the variability of discharge from glacier ice melt over 1980–2022, suggests that this catchment is unlikely to reach “peak water” (i.e., peak glacier contribution to catchment runoff) this century.
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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 | 0.000 | 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 | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| 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".