Alpine glacier simulation with linear climate models

We present a method of modeling climate forcing that can be used as inputs in simulation of alpine glaciers. We use Parallel Ice Sheet Model (PISM) framework to simulate the glaciers, which shapes the form in which we implement our method. For simulation, we consider two areas centered on mountain plateaus of Snežnik and Trnovski gozd in southern to south-western Slovenia which both bare evidence of glaciation in the last ice age. Since the glacial area to be simulated is small and the local weather is shaped by the local mountains, the readily available climate models do not have the required resolution to accurately model glacier development. We propose models for temperature and precipitation rooted in local data in form of weather stations and local to-pography. We experimentally test the proposed method by using it in PISM simulations and observing the results in terms of how closely the resulting glacier extent matches the esti-mated glacial extent from the literature. We also compare the proposed method against other methods used in similar cases that were recently published. We find that our method greatly improves the results of simulations on one of the study areas and could be modified for use in other similar cases as well.