This project is concerned with glacier and climate variations in the low latitudes, focusing on climatic forcing-response processes. Given the global nature of climate, interest is in the tropics as a whole, with a regional emphasis on East Africa. The project components include glacier area-change detection from satellite for selected mountains with suitable "ground truth"; ice volume-change detection from an areo-photogrammetric re-mapping of Mount Kenya's glaciers; a quantitative analysis of the various kinds of climatic forcing that have driven the changes of Lewis Glacier, Mount Kenya, from the latter part of the last century to the 1990's; and with lower priority, a comparative climatic forcing and retreat history of glaciers in New Guinea, East Africa, and the South American Andes. Overall, the project shall follow promising leads in the development of "tropical satellite glaciology" for climate purposes, in combination with the analysis of existing field observations, while requiring only limited field work. Particular attention shall be given to the quantitative evaluation of the climatic forcing of recent glacier changes that may be relevant to the "greenhouse" issue.
