Ward van Pelt
Associate professor

Fieldwork

Pictures of our annual field campaigns to Svalbard can be found here.

Meetings

  • Registration is open for the IASC Network on Arctic Glaciology meeting! [Obergurgl, Austria; 22-24 January 2024; link]

Thesis

An electronic copy of my PhD-thesis, defended in 2014, can be found here!

Energy balance - firn model

The coupled energy balance – snow and firn model (EBFM; Van Pelt et al. 2012, 2019) is a physically-based routine that simulates glacier surface and snow conditions. Driven by meteorological input the model generates distributed and time-dependent output of energy and mass exchange at the glacier surface, as well as multi-layer snow properties including density, temperature and water content. Current and previous users of the model and its output include colleagues at Uppsala University, Stockholm University, Utrecht University, the Norwegian Polar Institute, Fribourg University, Oslo University, University of Washington, the University of Edinburgh, Oxford University, Norwegian Mapping Authority, Norwegian Water Resources and Energy Directorate. Applications of the model include modeling glacier surface and snow conditions in Svalbard, Greenland, the Canadian Arctic, the Alps, northern Sweden and High-Mountain Asia. A MATLAB version of the source code of EBFM can be accessed here.



Seasonal snow model

A recently modified version of EBFM, the energy balance - snow model (EBSM), simulates seasonal snow pack evolution in non-glacier terrain. The snow model includes a soil routine to account for heat transfer in and between snow and soil. Other additions include a new scheme for the description of fresh snow density and compaction, and turbulent heat exchange. A MATLAB version of the source code of EBSM will appear online soon!