Glaciological monitoring in hohe tauern national park

Abstract

Glaciers are important and fast changing landscape elements in Hohe Tauern National Park (HTNP). In 1998, 10% of the HTNP area was covered with ice, less than half of the glaciated area during the Little Ice Age maximum. Glaciological monitoring includes mass balance measurements, glacier inventories, length change records and flow velocity measurements, complemented by climatological, hydrological and dendrochronological observations. All these data evidence the climate and glacier history of HTNP in an outstanding way, comparable to few other sites in the world.