Glaciers are important indicators of climate change; however, the monitoring accuracy of glacier changes is not high, and the analysis of mechanisms is difficult to quantify. Based on GRACE time-varying gravity data and climate hydrological data from 2003 to 2022, this article conducts monitoring of glacier mass change in the Pamir Plateau and analyzes its impact mechanism. To improve monitoring accuracy, we propose a combined filtering method that combines Gaussian filtering, decorrelation filtering, and Fan filtering to reduce the spherical harmonic coefficient error of the GRACE gravity field model. Furthermore, we use forward modeling to recover the gravity field leakage signal and solve the signal attenuation problem caused by filtering and truncation in GRACE data processing. To quantify the response relationship between glacier mass changes and temperature and precipitation changes, we analyzed the cross-wavelet coherence between glacier mass changes and temperature and precipitation changes through wavelet transform, and calculated their resonance periods. Our research has found that the glacier mass in the Pamir Plateau has shown a significant downward trend in the past 20 years, with a rate of decrease of −0.54 cm/yr. As the main factors affecting glacier mass changes, both temperature and precipitation have a resonance period of 8–16 months with glacier mass changes. The results can provide decision support for scientific response to climate change in the Pamir Plateau and even globally
Glaciers are important indicators of climate change; however, the monitoring accuracy of glacier changes is not high, and the analysis of mechanisms is difficult to quantify. Based on GRACE time-varying gravity data and climate hydrological data from 2003 to 2022, this article conducts monitoring of glacier mass change in the Pamir Plateau and analyzes its impact mechanism. To improve monitoring accuracy, we propose a combined filtering method that combines Gaussian filtering, decorrelation filtering, and Fan filtering to reduce the spherical harmonic coefficient error of the GRACE gravity field model. Furthermore, we use forward modeling to recover the gravity field leakage signal and solve the signal attenuation problem caused by filtering and truncation in GRACE data processing. To quantify the response relationship between glacier mass changes and temperature and precipitation changes, we analyzed the cross-wavelet coherence between glacier mass changes and temperature and precipitation changes through wavelet transform, and calculated their resonance periods. Our research has found that the glacier mass in the Pamir Plateau has shown a significant downward trend in the past 20 years, with a rate of decrease of −0.54 cm/yr. As the main factors affecting glacier mass changes, both temperature and precipitation have a resonance period of 8–16 months with glacier mass changes. The results can provide decision support for scientific response to climate change in the Pamir Plateau and even globally