North Pole and South Pole, in capital letters, are place names with which we do not refer to large regions around the Arctic and Antarctic, respectively. Sometimes, recently and as a didactic comparison, the third pole of the Earth is mentioned when mentioning the geographical characteristics and the accumulation of ice and snow in the Himalayan system, also called Hindu Kush-Himalaya (HKH).
This set of high-altitude mountain ranges and plateaus feeds rivers such as the Ganges, Indus, Mekong, Yangtze and Yellow, supplying water to more than 1 billion people in eight states.
The Himalayan system, which includes the Tibetan Plateau (Tibetan-Qinghai Plateau), also plays a substantial role in the global climate system, affecting atmospheric circulation and driving weather patterns, such as the Asian summer monsoon, all over the planet.
Climate change is producing alterations in the Himalayan system, and the increase in temperatures estimated by global warming models indicate dramatic effects on glaciers, snow cover, permafrost, runoff and vegetation in the region. These changes have repercussions on ecosystems at a local and global level but also directly threaten the ways of life and the survival of millions of people.
A study published in this week’s issue of Reviews of Geophysics by some twenty researchers reviews scientific knowledge about this vast region with special attention to the effects of climate change. The work of this group of experts, whose first signatory is Jianping Huang, from Lanzhou University (China) and the Tibetan Plateau Research Institute, in Beijing (China), divides the analysis into six large sections: observations of land interactions -atmosphere, changes in the climate system over the Tibetan plateau, the effects of the plateau on the transport of atmospheric species, the thermal and dynamic forcing of the plateau, its modulation of global climate and possible future changes in climate and forcings of the plateau, as summarized by Aaron Sidder in an informative article published in the magazine Eos, of the American Geophysical Union.
Research shows, for example, how the Tibetan Plateau drives surface pollutants into the upper troposphere during the Asian summer monsoon. They also describe how the plateau combines with the monsoon to influence global weather patterns in summer, while in winter it drives the climate through its effects on Rossby waves (also called planetary waves, a type of large-scale wave in atmospheric winds ranging from several hundred to thousands of kilometers).
In addition, the authors identify a set of needs for future research, such as the following:
– Improve data collection to quantitatively understand the role of climate in diabatic warming over the plateau
– Time-resolution details of observations (eg, hourly or daily) to model atmospheric processes such as clouds and precipitation with greater precision
– Expansion of knowledge of regional and global climate models to reduce biases in their representation of the plateau.
– Elaboration of a complete physical picture of the climatic dynamics and the thermal effects of the Tibetan plateau in the global climate.