et al. 2019a). A few studies also attribute the increase in the
mass of some glaciers in the Karakoram and Western
Himalaya to changes in the WD activity (Forsythe et al.
2017). In contrast to other mountain peaks across the globe,
which have largely experienced decreasing snowfall
amounts and glacial extent during the recent decades, the
Karakoram Himalayas appear to have slightly gained glacial
mass in the early twenty-first century (Gardelle et al. 2012;
Hewitt 2005; Kapnick et al. 2014).
11.3 Observed Changes in Temperature
and Precipitation Extremes
Significant rise in extreme warm events and a substantial fall
in extreme cold events observed over the HKH during the
last few decades (e.g. Sun et al. 2017). In particular, the
magnitude of trends in warm events is more significant than
those of the cold events. A significant rise in the number of
Fig. 11.2 Annual mean temperature time series (5-year running mean) averaged over HKH (grey) and Indian land mass (yellow) from 1951 to
2018
0
0.1
0.2
0.3
0.4
0.5
0.6
4.0
3.5
3.0
2.5
2.0
1.5
1.0
0.5
4.5
5.0
4.5Altitude (km)
Trend(C/decade)
Fig. 11.3 Elevation-dependent
warming over and around HKH.
Shown is the trend/decade of
surface air temperature for
respective altitude ranges
11 Climate Change Over the Himalayas
211