This is a renewal of EAR8317722. The project is concerned with tropical glaciers and their reponse to climatic forcing. Drawing on more than a decade's work in various high mountain regions of the tropics, research over the next few years will concentrate on the glaciers of Mount Kenya, and to a lesser extent on the ice masses of Peru's Cordillera Blanca. A major task to be accomplished by 1990 is the mapping of all of Mount Kenya's glaciers at scale l:5,000. In conjunction with a 1963 mapping this will document the glacier changes over the past quarter century and serve as control for recent and future measurements of terminus variations. This task entails the establishement of control points through ground surveys during 1987-89, and airborne photogrammetry in 1989-90. The Lewis Glacier shall be re-mapped for the March 1990 datum at scale 1:2,500. The observations of preceipitation, net balance, and ice flow velocity on the Lewis Glacier will continue. These form the basis for the quantitative formulation of forcing-response relationships in terms of the mass and heat budgets. Also, the decade-long net balance record along with the assessments of bedrock and surface topography and ice flow measurements will serve as input for predictions of the spatial pattern of ice thinning and slowdown of the ice flow. Verification of these forecasts represents a stringent test for an understanding of tropical climate-cryosphere relationships.
