Another east coast snowstorm brewing

Wakefield:
a slower melt of the world’s glaciers is a melt nonetheless, with serious ramifications for those societies and cultures that presently depend on water from said sources.
……….
tty (03:32:08) :
The glaciers do affect the timing of the runoff. Snow melts later and slower and the summer low in river runoff is consequently mitigated.

A timing ramifaction might not be serious, but if so it could be solved by a low-level dam. As for the idea, implied by some, that diminished Himalayan glacier levels would mean less total water downstream, and/or that Himalayan glaciers are shrinking due to global warming:

Brian Macker (18:07:47) :

“On a regional scale, mountain snow pack, glaciers and small ice caps play a crucial role in freshwater availability.“

… The glaciers could disappear tomorrow and the rivers would still flow. Think about it a little bit.
If the glaciers stopped melting they would contribute NO water to rivers on a yearly basis. Then were does all the water in the rivers come from? Snow and rain. Most of the water flowing off glaciers is the melting of snow that was deposited the prior winter.
In winter same snowfall is also falling everywhere else on the entire mountain, valleys, hills, and planes surrounding the mountain. Far more snow falls on those areas than the comparatively small areas occupied by glaciers.
This study [see link below—RK] … found that 4% of the studied area was covered by glacier and only ~4% of the runoff came from the glacier. But that is right around what would be expected just from annual percipitation that would fall on the glacier.

Here are extracts from that study:

Annual Runoff from Glaciers of the
Nepal Himalaya
Donald Alford. Ph.D.
IV, Discussion
Many factors determine the runoff characteristics of mountain catchment basins (e.g., Alford, 1985). With increasing altitude, atmospheric moisture decreases, increasing amounts of precipitation fall as snow, and short wave radiation becomes the dominant source of the energy controlling snow and ice melt. All of the data available for the high altitude portions of the catchment basins of the Nepal Himalaya indicates that this belt is characterized by low values of mass and energy exchange.
The most salient finding of this study is that the glaciers of the Nepal Himalaya do not appear to make a significant contribution to the total streamflow of the rivers of Nepal.
………………
It is probably unreasonable to assume, as some have, that the present retreat of Himalayan glaciers is somehow a result of rising air temperatures. These are relatively low latitude glaciers, at altitudes between 4000 meters and 7000 meters above sea level. Under these circumstances, it is most probable that the dominant energy source driving ice melt is radiation, not air temperature.
http://www.google.com/url?sa=t&source=web&ct=res&cd=4&ved=0CBcQFjAD&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.mtnforum.org%2Frs%2Fol%2Fcounter_docdown.cfm%3FfID%3D1294.pdf&rct=j&q=nepal+glacier+%22surface+area%22&ei=frRXS_vFIZCj8AaCp6DOAw&usg=AFQjCNEFkIJmzsjFhp2h84gIdEEiDopn4A