ABSTRACT
Presently, worldwide climate-related long-term glaciermonitoring supports fourmajor goals. (1) Long-term monitoring of glaciers is a base for understanding of processes that are related to interactions between glaciers and climate. (2) Due to the climate sensitivity of glaciers, their monitoring supports the detection of climate and environmental change that is expressed through glaciers and their changes. Glacier changes reflect for example the regional variability of climate change, or allow for detecting climate change in remote areas where no meteorological measurements are available (Figure 15.1). (3) Results from glacier monitoring aid the validation of models such as global and regional climate models (GCMs and RCMs), impact models, sensitivity studies, scenarios, interpolations and extrapolations in space and time, etc. Finally, (4) glacier monitoring supports the assessment of impacts that result from climate-change induced glacier changes. The most important global-scale impact is global sea level change. The most important regional-and local-scale impacts include change of water resources and glacier runoff, natural hazards, landscape change, effects on tourism, glacier-permafrost interactions and sediment budget.
