Estimating meteorological variables within glacier boundary layers, Southern Coast Mountains, British Columbia, Canada

Distributed melt models are commonly used in the fields of both snow and glacier hydrology, yet glacier boundary layers represent an important limitation with respect to the interpolation and extrapolation of input data used to drive distributed glacier melt models. This study examines hourly meteorological data collected at six automatic weather stations operating at two glacier sites in the southern Coast Mountains of British Columbia. Specifically, we compare empirical models for estimating near-surface temperatures within the glacier boundary layer using atmospheric lapse rates obtained from regional climate data and gridded North American Regional Reanalysis (NARR) data.

Regional climate networks offer a better fit to observed on-glacier temperatures than NARR. However, NARR-derived temperature series can be used in remote locations, and their performance in this study is encouraging for regional melt modeling efforts. Simple and effective meteorological parameterizations that incorporate glacier boundary layer effects developed in this study are important for developing snow and ice melt estimates in regional applications and at unmonitored sites.