Monitoring the Himalayan System as a Coupled State An Upstream-to-Downstream Framework Integrating Climate, Cryosphere, Hydrology, Geophysics, Tidal Forcing, and Temporal-State Dynamics in Nepal
Year: 2026
Type: preprint
Abstract: Himalayan mountain systems couple climatic forcing, cryospheric storage and instability, hydrological propagation, geophysical processes, and — as an exploratory hypothesis — lunar–solar tidal forcing into a single dynamically evolving state. Existing hazard-monitoring approaches in Nepal typically treat these domains, and individual hazard types such as glacial lake outburst floods (GLOFs), debris flows, and landslides, as separately monitored phenomena rather than as manifestations of one coupled system undergoing state transitions. This paper proposes a formal upstream-to-downstream monitoring and analysis framework that represents the Himalayan environment as a state vector X(t) = [C(t), Cry(t), H(t), G(t), T(t), EO(t)], augmented by an exploratory temporal-state coordinate M(t) partitioning the diurnal cycle into 48-minute bins. The framework treats hazard occurrence as a transition between defined system states (Stable → Perturbed → Elevated → Critical → Hazard manifestation → Downstream propagation) rather than as an isolated event, and specifies explicit falsification criteria for its two exploratory hypotheses: (i) that lunar–solar tidal forcing shows a measurable, non-trivial temporal association with instability events after controlling for established environmental drivers, and (ii) that 48-minute temporal segmentation reveals reproducible structure not attributable to arbitrary bin selection. The catastrophic 26 August 2026 Lhende Khola–Bhote Koshi–Trishuli disaster in Rasuwa district — attributed by ICIMOD, Nepal's Department of Hydrology and Meteorology, and the USGS to a high-altitude ice-rock avalanche and associated glacial lake/river blockage — is used to illustrate the event-reconstruction protocol using only currently published, citable facts. No original statistical association between tidal forcing, the 48-minute segmentation, and this or any other event is claimed in this manuscript; the framework, event-reconstruction protocol, and falsification design are presented as a methodological contribution intended to guide a subsequent, data-driven analysis phase.
Author: Pandey, Ramchandra
Subfield: Atmospheric Science
Field: Earth and Planetary Sciences
Domain: Physical Sciences
SDG: Climate action
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W7204689675
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