Mass balance models#

OGGM allows to mix and compare many different implementations of climatic mass balance (MB) models. These models all follow a predefined “interface” (programming jargon for naming conventions) so that they can communicate with the Geometry evolution models.

In fact, what OGGM calls a “mass balance model” is any function that provides surface mass balance information to the geometry evolution model for the run. Therefore, while some mass balance models can be quite complex and take many physical processes into account, other model classes can implement idealized concepts, random samples or simplifications of the more realistic ones.

Here are some of the options available to our users to compute the mass balance:

Check out these recent developments!

PyGEM is a standalone model that has been applied to High Mountain Asia (Rounce et al., 2020a, 2020b). David and the OGGM team have worked extensively to make PyGEM’s MB model compatible with the OGGM workflow, resulting in this global PyGEM-OGGM study published in Science The capacity to run OGGM with PyGEM as mass balance model is now available on the PyGEM repository.

OGGM’s massbalance-sandbox is the future generation of OGGM’s climatic MB models. They are currently in the development and testing phase, but they can readily be used with a recent OGGM version.