Brief communication: Glacier thickness reconstruction on Mt. Kilimanjaro

Abstract

Glaciers on Kilimanjaro are unique indicators for climatic change in the tropical midtroposphere of Africa, but their disappearance seems imminent. A key unknown is their present ice thickness. Here, we present thickness maps for the Northern Ice Field (NIF) and Kersten Glacier (KG) with mean values of 26.6 and 9.3 m, respectively, in 2011. In absence of direct measurements on KG, multitemporal satellite information was exploited to infer past thickness values in areas that have become ice-free and therefore allow glacier-specific calibration. In these areas, KG is unrealistically thick in the existing consensus estimate of global glacier ice thickness.