IACS Early-Career Award Recipients 2021
David Bigelow, Simon Fraser University, Canada
Bigelow, D. G., Flowers, G. E., Schoof, C. G., Mingo, L. D. B., Young, E. M., & Connal, B. G. (2020). The role of englacial hydrology in the filling and drainage of an ice-dammed lake, Kaskawulsh Glacier, Yukon, Canada. Journal of Geophysical Research: Earth Surface, 125, e2019JF005110. https://doi.org/10.1029/2019JF005110
Citation for the paper by the Selection Panel:
David Bigelow and his co-authors present and analyse an impressive dataset of a glacier-dammed lake at Kaskawulsh glacier, Western Canada, using new geophysical methods. Their results enhance our understanding of glacial lakes, particularly regarding the role of englacial storage. The study shows that subaerial, sub-glacial and englacial reservoirs are all important in the filling and draining of the ice-marginal lake at Kaskawulsh glacier. The study will cause a rethinking of filling and draining of glacial lakes. It has potential applications in terms of estimating lake volumes and shows the need to improve computations of rates of drainage based on hypsometric curves for glacial lakes.
Giulia Mazzotti, WSL Institute for Snow and Avalanche Research SLF, Davos, Switzerland
Mazzotti, G., Essery, R., Webster, C., Malle, J., & Jonas, T. (2020). Process-level evaluation of a hyper-resolution forest snow model using distributed multi-sensor observations. Water Resources Research, 56, e2020WR027572. https://doi.org/10.1029/2020WR027572
Citation for the paper by the Selection Panel:
Giulia Mazzotti and her co-authors have collected comprehensive sets of distributed sub-canopy data at three forested sites. The multi-sensor approach allowed validate and analysis of the performance of the enhanced factorial snow-cover model FSM2 run at a resolution of 2 m. The results obtained provide an optimal basis for assessing the snow-hydrological impacts of forest disturbances and for validating and improving the representation of forest snow processes in land surface models intended for coarser-scale applications. This novel and original work must thus be seen as a milestone in reducing the significant shortcomings of former forest snow models.
The 2021 evaluation panel: Liss M. Andreassen (Chair), Charles Fierz, Christine Hvidberg, Tómas Jóhannesson, Sophie Nowicki, Anaïs Orsi, Takenobu Toyota and Martin Truffer.