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Abstract:
Mount Elbrus is the highest peak in Europe (5642 m), and is a presently inactive volcano that is covered by thirty glaciers (Kutuzov et al., 2019). Over the past decades, the mass loss of the Elbrus glacier complex has been highly variable in space (Zolotarev, 2009; Kutuzov et al., 2019), with south- and east-oriented glaciers having the most negative mass balance as opposed to west-and north-oriented glaciers. This spatial discrepancy can be explained by several factors, including an inhomogeneous shadowing, differences in orographic precipitation due to prevailing westerlies, differences in glacier terminus elevation, presence and changes in debris cover, avalanches feeding several glaciers, and wind-blown snow redistribution.In this study, we calculate the evolution of all Elbrus glaciers throughout the 21st century with the GloGEMflow model (Zekollari et al., 2019), which accounts for ice-dynamical processes. For the mass balance, we rely on an energy-balance approach, which is forced by high-resolution CORDEX climate scenarios. To assess the importance of wind redistribution of snow and the effects this has on the mass balance, we utilize an orographic precipitation model. Additionally, we also account for the effect that debris cover has on the mass balance, and explicitly model the debris-cover evolution over time. These detailed incorporations of energy balance, snow redistribution and debris cover are tested against more simplified approaches commonly used in large-scale glacier modelling, allowing us to assess the added value of relying on these more advanced representations.This study was funded by the RSF grant number 23-27-00050.
