Dr Ethan Lee

Water Security and Scarcity in the Andes

He is a PDRA on the Deplete and Retreat Project that focuses on water resources across the South American Andes. This work has installed automated weather stations (AWS) across the Andes, along with glacier monitoring equipment. Ethan is conducting the numerical modelling over the glaciers to understand their future extents, along with their remaining volume, to future climate changes. This will inform future hydrological modelling to understand their future variability as water resources for downstream communities.

Tropical Glaciers

Tropical glaciers exhibit extreme sensitivity to global temperature variations, often responding earlier than mid- and high-latitude glaciers. As a result, they serve as excellent physical indicators of both current and past climate change. Their susceptibility to insolation forcing and localised effects of sea surface temperatures (SST) makes them an ideal study region for understanding climate changes during the Late Quaternary. Additionally, low-elevation glaciations within the tropics, which occurred during the Last Glacial Maximum (LGM), provide valuable insights into disentangling Late Pleistocene climate change from Holocene climate fluctuations.

Mountain Glaciations

Mountain glaciers worldwide are experiencing rapid decline due to climate change. These glaciers often function as natural water towers, playing a crucial role in supporting downstream communities, acting as a buffer to drought conditions that are exhibited by climate change. His research focuses on both the historical and future extents of mountain glaciers, building upon his previous work with Himalayan glaciers, and those in the Andes. By analysing geomorphological evidence of past glacier positions, his research contributes to training numerical models that enhance our understanding and prediction of their future extent and dynamics to future climate changes.