Mass balance models¶

Per design, OGGM allows to mix and compare many different implementations of climatic mass balance (MB) models. These models all follow a predefined “interface” (programmin 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 object that provides surface mass balance information to the geometry evolution model for the run. Therefore, while some of these MB models can be quite complex and take many processes into account, other model classes can implement idealized concepts, averages or simplifications of the more realistic ones.

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

Out of the oven!

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. This feature 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.