Hot spots of glacier mass balance variability in Central Asia

The Tien Shan and Pamir mountains host over 28,000 glaciers providing essential water resources for increasing water demand in Central Asia. A disequilibrium between glaciers and climate affects meltwater release to Central Asian rivers, challenging the region's water availability. Previous research has neglected temporal variability. We present glacier mass balance estimates based on transient snowline and geodetic surveys with unprecedented spatiotemporal resolution from 1999/00 to 2017/18. Our results reveal spatiotemporal heterogeneity characterized by two mass balance clusters: (a) positive, low variability, and (b) negative, high variability. This translates into variable glacial meltwater release (≈1–16%) of annual river runoff for two watersheds. Our study reveals more complex climate forcing-runoff responses and importance of glacial meltwater variability for the region than suggested previously.ISSN:0094-8276ISSN:1944-800

Parametric Phonon-Helicon Interaction in Centrosymmetric Crystals with Strain-Dependent Dielectric Constant

The process of interaction between circularly polarized coherent transverse phonons and slow electrokinetic waves in the centrosymmetric crystal placed in a longitudinal magnetic field and possessing strong strain dependence of the dielectric constant caused by the electrostriction is considered. The cut-off system of equations for the process of nonlinear four-wave interaction in crystal with a quadratic electrostriction corresponding to direct energy conversion from helicon to acoustic wave is derived. The solution is sought for numerically in the vicinity of a synchronism point determined by the intersection of helicon and phonon dispersion curves at different values of semiconductor plasma parameters. The results show the possibility of effective phonon parametric amplification in semiconductor crystal with the electroinduced elastic anisotropy