like this one in the town of Gangotri, allow pilgrims to bathe in the holy water. Scientists are concerned about the stability of the Gangotri Glacier because the river is an important source of water for India’s population. (Courtesy H. Cirici) Kargel and Racoviteanu are seeing that glaciers are not responding to climate uniformly: Glaciers in certain areas of the Himalaya are behaving differently from glaciers in other parts of the massive range. Some glaciers in the western Himalaya and neighboring Karakoram Range, such as the Baltoro Glacier of Pakistan, are growing. And most of the melting glaciers, such as the Gangotri and Imja, are located in the central and eastern Himalaya. What accounts for the difference between the eastern and western ends of the range? Atmosphere and ice The researchers, together with other colleagues, found a clue in the intersection of atmospheric forces swirling above the region. Cold, dry winds blowing south from the Tibetan Plateau clash with moisture-laden monsoon winds swinging north from the Indian Ocean. In the past, this pattern generated enough snow to sustain glaciers across the Himalaya. But combusted carbon and dense air pollution increasingly cloud the skies over Asia, changing precipitation in some areas and increasing melt in others. Much of this pollution is natural in origin, and includes dust, desert sand, and salt particles. But in South Asia most of the air pollution, particularly black carbon, or soot, is generated by human activity. Kargel said, “In South Asia, brick ovens are a major source of soot. Automobile tires wear down and that puts little rubber particles in the atmosphere. Coal-fired plants produce a lot of soot. And combusting gasoline in automobiles and other engines creates soot.” Soot is a new addition to glaciers already covered with debris. “There’s this unsteady, quasi-balance of forces between the building up and the wearing down that produces a huge amount of rock debris. That’s mostly what we

Insights into elevation-dependent warming in the Tibetan Plateau-Himalayas from CMIP5 model simulations | Climate Dynamics | Springer Nature Link # Insights into elevation-dependent warming in the Tibetan Plateau-Himalayas from CMIP5 model simulations - Open access - Published: 17 August 2016 - Volume 48, pages 3991–4008 (2017) - Cite this article You have full access to this open access article Climate Dynamics Aims and scope Submit manuscript ## Abstract We use the output of twenty-seven Global Climate Models participating in the Coupled Model Intercomparison Project phase 5 (CMIP5) to investigate the temperature changes and their dependence on the elevation in the Tibetan Plateau, Himalaya and Karakoram mountains and in the surrounding areas in historical model simulations and in future projections. The aim of this study is to explore if and to what extent the CMIP5 models show elevation-dependent warming (EDW) in this part of the globe and to investigate what are the driving factors at play and their relative importance. Our results indicate that the models show enhanced rates of warming at higher elevations in the Tibetan Plateau-Himalayan region in the twentieth centur