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Recent Increases in Winter Snowfall Provide Resilience to Very Small Glaciers in the Julian Alps, Europe

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Recent Increases in Winter Snowfall Provide Resilience to Very Small Glaciers in the Julian Alps, Europe atmosphere Article Recent Increases in Winter Snowfall Provide Resilience to Very Small Glaciers in the Julian Alps, Europe Renato R. Colucci 1,2,*,† , Manja Žebre 3,‡, Csaba Zsolt Torma 4 , Neil F. Glasser 3 , Eleonora Maset 5 , Costanza Del Gobbo 2,6 and Simone Pillon 2 1 CNR—Institute of Polar Sciences c/o Scientific Campus Ca’ Foscari University in Venice, 30172 Mestre (VE), Italy 2 Department of Mathematics and Geosciences, University of Trieste, 34100 Trieste, Italy; [email protected] (C.D.G.); [email protected] (S.P.) 3 Department of Geography & Earth Sciences, Aberystwyth University, Aberystwyth SY23 3FL, UK; [email protected] (M.Ž.); [email protected] (N.F.G.) 4 Department of Meteorology, Eötvös Loránd University, 1117 Budapest, Hungary; [email protected] 5 Polytechnic Department of Engineering and Architecture, University of Udine, 33100 Udine, Italy; [email protected] 6 International Centre for Theoretical Physics, 34151 Trieste, Italy * Correspondence: [email protected] † Previously at CNR-ISMAR Trieste, Italy. ‡ Currently at Geological Survey of Slovenia, Ljubljana, Slovenia. Abstract: Very small glaciers (<0.5 km2) account for more than 80% of the total number of glaciers and more than 15% of the total glacier area in the European Alps. This study seeks to better understand the impact of extreme snowfall events on the resilience of very small glaciers and ice patches in the southeastern European Alps, an area with the highest mean annual precipitation in the entire Citation: Colucci, R.R.; Žebre, M.; Alpine chain. Mean annual precipitation here is up to 3300 mm water equivalent, and the winter Torma, C.Z.; Glasser, N.F.; Maset, E.; snow accumulation is approximately 6.80 m at 1800 m asl averaged over the period 1979–2018. As a Del Gobbo, C.; Pillon, S. Recent consequence, very small glaciers and ice/firn patches are still present in this area at rather low Increases in Winter Snowfall Provide altitudes (1830–2340 m). We performed repeated geodetic mass balance measurements on 14 ice Resilience to Very Small Glaciers in bodies during the period 2006–2018 and the results show an increase greater than 10% increase in ice the Julian Alps, Europe. Atmosphere 2021, 12, 263. https://doi.org/ volume over this period. This is in accordance with several extreme winter snow accumulations in 10.3390/atmos12020263 the 2000s, promoting a positive mass balance in the following years. The long-term evolution of these very small glaciers and ice bodies matches well with changes in mean temperature of the ablation Academic Editor: Scott Osprey season linked to variability of Atlantic Multidecadal Oscillation. Nevertheless, the recent behaviour of such residual ice masses in this area where orographic precipitation represents an important Received: 26 November 2020 component of weather amplification is somehow different to most of the Alps. We analysed synoptic Accepted: 9 February 2021 meteorological conditions leading to the exceptional snowy winters in the 2000s, which appear to be Published: 17 February 2021 related to the influence and modification of atmospheric planetary waves and Arctic Amplification, with further positive feedbacks due to change in local sea surface temperature and its interactions Publisher’s Note: MDPI stays neutral with low level flows and the orography. Although further summer warming is expected in the next with regard to jurisdictional claims in decades, we conclude that modification of storm tracks and more frequent occurrence of extreme published maps and institutional affil- snowfall events during winter are crucial in ensuring the resilience of small glacial remnants in iations. maritime alpine sectors. Keywords: small glaciers; glacier mass balance; climate; AMO; precipitation; climate change Copyright: © 2021 by the authors. Licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland. This article is an open access article 1. Introduction distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons Ice bodies in the Julian Alps are typically in the smallest size category of glaciers, Attribution (CC BY) license (https:// with several glacial and nival ice patches [1] and one small mountain glacier [2]. These very creativecommons.org/licenses/by/ small ice masses have gained an increasing scientific importance in the last few decades e.g., 4.0/). in the studies of Mediterranean [3] glaciation during the Pleistocene and the Holocene [4] Atmosphere 2021, 12, 263. https://doi.org/10.3390/atmos12020263 https://www.mdpi.com/journal/atmosphere Atmosphere 2021, 12, 263 2 of 25 and elsewhere. Small glaciers represent relevant component of the cryosphere contributing to landscape formation, local hydrology and sea level-rise [3]. At a regional scale like the European Alps, residual ice masses may occupy a significant volume fraction and their omission could result in errors of ±10%. For this reason, several authors stressed to the production of accurate inventories considering all ice bodies down to 0.01 km2 or smaller in order to reduce uncertainties [5,6]. Despite their small size, they are widespread and likely account for about 80–90% of the total number of mid- to low-latitude ice bodies in mountain ranges. For this reason, it is important to understand their behaviour [7]. The Alpine landscape is rapidly changing due to global warming and larger ice masses continue to disintegrate into smaller ice bodies (e.g., [2,8–10]). In the future, alpine glaciers will be likely characterized by a larger number of these very small ice bodies, especially in karstic terrains. Indeed, the cryosphere is rapidly declining in most, if not all, high elevation environments on Earth [11] and anthropogenic climate change is thought to be the main cause in accelerating this process over the next few decades. In the European Alps a rapid glacier retreat and downwasting has been observed in the early 21st century with regionally variable ice thickness changes of −0.5 to −0.9ma−1 and an estimated 2000–2014 mass loss of 1.3 ± 0.2 Gt a−1 [12]. The Equilibrium Line Altitude (ELA) in the Alps rose by 170–250 m in the last few decades [13], and in the Julian Alps, the Environmental ELA (envELA; [14]), the temperature-precipitation-dependent ELA [15,16], rose from 2350 to 2750 m between the early 1980s to the beginning of the 2000s [17]. The main cause for glacier retreat in the Alps is related to longer and warmer summers modulated by winter precipitation anomalies [11,13,18–20]). Nevertheless, the magnitude of these impacts is both site- and catchment-specific and depends on the resilience and buffering capacities of the system, including the area occupied by glaciers and permafrost, basin hypsometry, groundwater systems, vegetation type and cover, and ecosystem types [21–23]. Such ongoing major and unprecedented glacier decline strongly affects also the integrity and value of several World Heritage sites [20]. Very small glaciers are very sensitive to climatic change and subsequently their areas may change significantly on a decadal, and even on a yearly basis [24]. Nevertheless, small glaciers and ice patches in some sectors of the Alps as well as in some Mediterranean areas have surprisingly shown a slowdown in the reduction rate from the mid-2000s even though summer temperatures continued to rise at double the rate of the global average [2,17,25–30]. This is especially true in more maritime environments where mean annual precipitation (MAP) is very high or where the topography favours snow accumula- tion [31–33] Based on high-resolution and high quality daily precipitation measurements, the Julian Alps is considered as a mesoscale hot spot of heavy precipitation [34] where the highest alpine MAP is recorded [35]. Furthermore, total precipitation has different origins over the northern and southern flanks of the chain: precipitation is more frequent but with lower intensity to the north, while much of the total precipitation to the south is due to rare intense weather events [34]. Local feedbacks and synoptic conditions can favour or even moderate such events. Variation in the large-scale atmospheric circulation, in part associated with climatic modes of variability such as the North Atlantic Oscillation (NAO) and the Atlantic Multi- decadal Oscillation (AMO), produces different synoptic conditions (Northern Hemisphere teleconnection patterns, cyclones) leading to a high interannual variability of temperature and winter precipitation over the Alps [36,37]. NAO is an irregular fluctuation of surface atmospheric pressure over the North Atlantic Ocean involving the subtropical high located over the Azores islands and the semi- permanent subpolar low pressure system centered over Iceland [38]. In wintertime the NAO can be considered as the most energetic mode of climate variability in the northern hemisphere that can also manifest itself in extreme weather events [39]. AMO explains multidecadal sea surface temperature (SST) variability in the North Atlantic Ocean from 0◦ to 70◦ N, with a cycle of 65–70 years and 0.4 ◦C range between extremes [40]. Accordingly, as one of the most prominent modes of climate variability, Atmosphere 2021, 12, 263 3 of 25 AMO also influences Europe’s climate [41]. For instance, it has already proven that AMO has impact on severe cold events across Europe as the positive phase of the AMO manifests in more frequent negative NAO, thus more blocking events associated with extreme weather conditions might occur [42]. The primary influence of AMO on alpine climate is on mean air temperature, while its influence on precipitation is less clear [43,44]. Precipitation, both in winter and summer, is strongly influenced by the position of blocking high [45]. Long-lasting high pressure system, which blocks the moisture air or Atlantic winter cyclones penetrating from the west, leads to stable conditions along with the downwelling motions [46]. Accordingly, during wintertime within a region where weather conditions are dominated by an anticyclone, over the basins surrounded by mountains, sharp temperature inversion can occur [47,48].
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