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Spatial and temporal patterns of the inter-annual oscillations of glacier mass over Central Asia inferred from Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment (GRACE) data

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Abstract

Monitoring glacier mass balance is crucial to managing water resources and also to understanding climate change for the arid and semi-arid regions of Central Asia. This study extracted the inter-annual oscillations of glacier mass over Central Asia from the first ten principal components (S-PCs) of filtered variability via multichannel singular spectral analysis (MSSA), based on gridded data of glacier mass inferred from Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment (GRACE) data obtained from July 2002 to March 2015. Two significant cycles of glacier mass balance oscillations were identified. The first cycle with a period of 6.1-year accounted for 54.5% of the total variance and the second with a period of 2.3-year accounted for 4.3%. The 6.1-year oscillation exhibited a stronger variability compared with the 2.3-year oscillation. For the 6.1-year oscillation, the results from lagged cross-correlation function suggested that there were significant correlations between glacier mass balances and precipitation variations with the precipitation variations leading the response of glacier mass balances by 9–16 months.

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Acknowledgments

This work was funded by the National Basic Research Program of China (2012CB957703, 2013CB733301), and the National Natural Science Foundation of China (41274025, 41174064). Cordial thanks should be extended to the Center for Space Research (CSR) at the University of Texas at Austin.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. State Key Laboratory of Geodesy and Earth’s Dynamics, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Wuhan, 430077, China

    Chuandong Zhu, Yang Lu, Hongling Shi & Zizhan Zhang

  2. University of Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing, 100049, China

    Chuandong Zhu, Yang Lu, Hongling Shi & Zizhan Zhang

  3. Center for Space Research, University of Texas at Austin, Austin, 78759, USA

    Zizhan Zhang

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  1. Chuandong Zhu
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  2. Yang Lu
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Correspondence to Chuandong Zhu.

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Zhu, C., Lu, Y., Shi, H. et al. Spatial and temporal patterns of the inter-annual oscillations of glacier mass over Central Asia inferred from Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment (GRACE) data. J. Arid Land 9, 87–97 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s40333-016-0021-z

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s40333-016-0021-z

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