ALPCHANGE - Climate Change and Impacts in Southern Austria

The aim of ALPCHANGE is to quantify landscape dynamics in alpine regions caused by climate change in past and present. ALPCHANGE provides an integrative and comprehensive analysis of monitoring data describing four dynamic landscape parameters - permafrost, snow, geomorphology and glaciers - in terms of the ongoing climate change. These parameters react in different time scales to climate change and are therefore providing different information: snow cover instantly, glaciers within years to decades (depending on size), geomorphic features within years to decades and permafrost within decades to centuries. Complex analyses of these high mountain processes will be realized with the aid of an upgraded monitoring network for the very first time in Southern Austria. The interdisciplinarity of the study approaches requires usage of different disciplines - like remote sensing, field work techniques or the elaborated analysis of various historical and semi-historical databasis - and makes the co- operation of five scientific institutions necessary. Landscape dynamics represented by the four parameters will be analysed in four different spatial scales: study region (c.650 km), study environment type (vertical differentiation), study test area (few ha to km) and study test site (local). Three meteorological stations, one permanent DC-resistivity tomograph-station, several temperature sensors and two automatic digital cameras form the core infrastructure for high quality long-term monitoring. The result is a comprehensive picture of glacier behaviour (temporal/spatial variability of glaciated areas, structural and morphological changes of glacier surface), snow cover behaviour (automatic snow cover monitoring), geomorphodynamics (mass-movement processes on debris-mantled slopes, solifluction and rock slope processes, proglacial modification of glacier foreland, debris flow tracks in alpine areas), and permafrost characteristics (remote sensed mapping of permafrost related areas, rock glacier structural characteristics and clast analysis, permafrost field measuring campaigns, DC-resistivity tomography, monitoring nourishment rates and processes at rock glaciers, temperature regime of ground and surface). The success of a quantification of actual geosystem dynamics will be enabled by the establishment of a GIS dataset. Requirements for comprehensive correlation analyses and extrapolations of climate/landscape parameter modelling will be defined in the form of conceptual models. These conceptual models will be the basis for the development of preliminary numerical models, which will allow first quantifications of landscape dynamics. Due to the fact that the project period is limited to three years a following project will include a continuation of monitoring landscape parameters (2008-2011) in order to gather a longer monitoring record. Only with a longer data record a higher degree of accuracy of prediction of future geosystem dynamics is assured.

The aim of ALPCHANGE is to quantify landscape dynamics in alpine regions caused by climate change in past and present. ALPCHANGE provides an integrative and comprehensive analysis of monitoring data describing four dynamic landscape parameters - permafrost, snow, geomorphology and glaciers - in terms of the ongoing climate change. These parameters react in different time scales to climate change and are therefore providing different information: snow cover instantly, glaciers within years to decades (depending on size), geomorphic features within years to decades and permafrost within decades to centuries. Complex analyses of these high mountain processes will be realized with the aid of an upgraded monitoring network for the very first time in Southern Austria. The interdisciplinarity of the study approaches requires usage of different disciplines - like remote sensing, field work techniques or the elaborated analysis of various historical and semi-historical databasis - and makes the co- operation of five scientific institutions necessary. Landscape dynamics represented by the four parameters will be analysed in four different spatial scales: study region (c.650 km), study environment type (vertical differentiation), study test area (few ha to km) and study test site (local). Three meteorological stations, one permanent DC-resistivity tomograph-station, several temperature sensors and two automatic digital cameras form the core infrastructure for high quality long-term monitoring. The result is a comprehensive picture of glacier behaviour (temporal/spatial variability of glaciated areas, structural and morphological changes of glacier surface), snow cover behaviour (automatic snow cover monitoring), geomorphodynamics (mass-movement processes on debris-mantled slopes, solifluction and rock slope processes, proglacial modification of glacier foreland, debris flow tracks in alpine areas), and permafrost characteristics (remote sensed mapping of permafrost related areas, rock glacier structural characteristics and clast analysis, permafrost field measuring campaigns, DC-resistivity tomography, monitoring nourishment rates and processes at rock glaciers, temperature regime of ground and surface). The success of a quantification of actual geosystem dynamics will be enabled by the establishment of a GIS dataset. Requirements for comprehensive correlation analyses and extrapolations of climate/landscape parameter modelling will be defined in the form of conceptual models. These conceptual models will be the basis for the development of preliminary numerical models, which will allow first quantifications of landscape dynamics. Due to the fact that the project period is limited to three years a following project will include a continuation of monitoring landscape parameters (2008-2011) in order to gather a longer monitoring record. Only with a longer data record a higher degree of accuracy of prediction of future geosystem dynamics is assured.