glacier-buffer-replacement-utac

GenesisAeon Package 100 — companion to glacier-buffer-utac (P99, the loss side). This package covers the replacement/mitigation side: Artificial Glacier Buffer Replacement (AGBR). Deliberately has no UTAC/CREP/AFET bridge — see DISCLAIMER.md.

For a plain-language explanation of the same topic (German, no jargon, written for general audiences), see WHITEPAPER.md.

Two explicit confidence tiers

• Core (reservoir, mar, evaporation, mass_balance): real, peer-reviewed findings independently re-verified 2026-08-10 via direct paper/DOI lookup — not just copied from the originating DeepResearch report.
• Optional / speculative (peatland, rrf): weakly sourced or literally unpublished figures, kept because they were part of the original discussion. Always exposed with an explicit warning constant (PEATLAND_WEAK_SOURCE_WARNING, RRF_NOT_PEER_REVIEWED_WARNING).

What's real here (core)

• Farinotti, Pistocchi & Huss (2016, Environmental Research Letters): an optimally sited dam/reservoir strategy could offset up to 65% of the projected end-of-century summer-runoff change in the European Alps — a real, verified ceiling, not a guarantee.
• Steffen et al. (2022, Earth Surface Dynamics): 683 potential new Swiss proglacial lakes, 1.16 km³ total potential volume — but only ~10% realized by 2050 and ~48% by 2100 under a middle-of-the-road scenario.
• Fabbri et al. (2021, Swiss Journal of Geosciences): real Lake Brienz sedimentation rates (3.0 cm/yr average, up to 4.7 cm/yr near deltas) — the physical limiter on how long a proglacial reservoir stays useful. v1.1.0 adds a second, mass-balance-based sedimentation model, sediment_volume_loss_from_mass_input_m3(): given a sediment mass input rate (kg/yr), converts it to a volume-loss rate via a bulk sediment density of ~2200 kg/m³ (attributed to the same Steffen et al. 2022 source as the proglacial-lake figures, though this specific density value wasn't independently re-verified — see DISCLAIMER.md).
• Ochoa-Tocachi et al. (2019, Nature Sustainability) and Jodar et al. (2022, Science of the Total Environment): two real, operating Managed Aquifer Recharge systems (Peruvian amunas, Spanish acequias de careo) — 45-day mean retention, +92% aquifer recharge respectively.
• Jin et al. (2023, Nature Sustainability) and Ilgen et al. (2024, Hydrological Sciences Journal): floating-solar evaporation mitigation, up to 49.7% at the Aswan High Dam's 90%-coverage case study.
• The core mass-balance argument (mass_balance.py): full replacement of a glacier's hydrological buffer is physically impossible — a network can only redistribute existing water in time, never create new water. full_replacement_is_possible() always returns False.

What's optional/speculative here

• peatland.py: a storage-capacity range that mixes a weak (legal document) citation with a non-Alpine (Brazilian tropical peat) measurement — flagged, not load-bearing.
• rrf.py: the "Resilience Replacement Factor" and its three named scenarios, inherited from the originating AI DeepResearch report with no primary citation for the formula itself. Every function carries RRF_NOT_PEER_REVIEWED_WARNING.

Quickstart

pip install glacier-buffer-replacement-utac

from glacier_buffer_replacement_utac import (
    theoretical_mitigation_ceiling,
    full_replacement_is_possible,
    SWISS_ALPS_LAKE_POTENTIAL,
    amuna_retention_days_mean,
    aswan_case_study,
    ALL_SCENARIOS,
    RRF_NOT_PEER_REVIEWED_WARNING,
)

print(theoretical_mitigation_ceiling())   # 0.65 -- Farinotti et al. 2016
print(full_replacement_is_possible())     # False, always
print(SWISS_ALPS_LAKE_POTENTIAL)
print(amuna_retention_days_mean())        # 45
print(aswan_case_study()["evaporation_reduction_pct"])  # 49.7

print(RRF_NOT_PEER_REVIEWED_WARNING)
for scenario in ALL_SCENARIOS:
    print(scenario.name, scenario.rrf_range)

Development

pip install -e ".[dev]"
pre-commit install
ruff check src tests
mypy src
pytest

Citation

See CITATION.cff and .zenodo.json.