Global warming has generally led to changes in river runoffs fed by snow and glacier meltwater in mountain ranges. The runoff of the Aksu River, which originates in the Southern Tienshan Mountains, exhibited a positive trend during 1979–2002, but this trend reversed during 2002–2015. Through a comprehensive analysis, this study aims to estimate potential reasons for changes in the runoff of its two contrasting headwaters: the Toxkan and Kumalak Rivers, based on climatic data, the altitude of the 0 °C isotherm, glacier mass balance (GMB), snow cover area (SCA), snow depth (SD) and the sensitivity model. For the Toxkan River, the decrease in spring runoff mainly resulted from reductions in precipitation, whereas the decrease in summer runoff was mainly caused by early snowmelt in spring and a much-reduced snow meltwater supply in summer. In addition, the obvious glacier area reduction in the catchment (decreased to less than 4%) also contributed to the reduced summer runoff. For the Kumalak River, a sharp decrease rate of 10.21 × 10⁸ m³/decade in runoff was detected due to summertime cooling of both surface and upper air temperatures. Reduced summer temperatures with a positive trend in precipitation not only inhibited glacier melting but also dropped the 0 °C layer altitude, resulting in a significant increase in summertime SCA and SD, a slowing of the glacier negative mass balance, and a lowering of the snow-line altitude.

Understanding glacio-hydrological processes is crucial to water resources management, especially under increasing global warming. However, data scarcity makes it challenging to quantify the contribution of glacial melt to streamflow in highly glacierized catchments such as those in the Tienshan Mountains. This study aims to investigate the glacio-hydrological processes in the SaryDjaz-Kumaric River (SDKR) basin in Central Asia by integrating a degree-day glacier melt algorithm into the macro-scale hydrological Soil and Water Assessment Tool (SWAT) model. To deal with data scarcity in the alpine area, a multi-objective sensitivity analysis and a multi-objective calibration procedure were used to take advantage of all aspects of streamflow. Three objective functions, i.e., the Nash–Sutcliffe efficiency coefficient of logarithms (LogNS), the water balance index (WBI), and the mean absolute relative difference (MARD), were considered. Results show that glacier and snow melt-related parameters are generally sensitive to all three objective functions. Compared to the original SWAT model, simulations with a glacier module match fairly well to the observed streamflow, with the Nash–Sutcliffe efficiency coefficient (NS) and R² approaching 0.82 and an absolute percentage bias less than 1%. Glacier melt contribution to runoff is 30–48% during the simulation period. The approach of combining multi-objective sensitivity analysis and optimization is an efficient way to identify important hydrological processes and recharge characteristics in highly glacierized catchments.

Conversion of biorenewable feedstocks into transportation fuels or chemicals likely necessitates the development of novel heterogeneous catalysts with good hydrothermal stability, due to the nature of highly oxygenated biomass compounds and the prevalence of water as a processing solvent. The use of carbon-based materials, derived from sugars as catalyst precursors, can achieve hydrothermal stability while simultaneously realizing the goal of sustainability. In this work, the simultaneous pyrolysis of glucose and taurine in the presence of multi-walled carbon nanotubes (MWCNTs), to obtain versatile solid acids, has been demonstrated. Structural and textural properties of the catalysts have been characterized by TEM, TGA, and XPS. Additionally, solid state nuclear magnetic resonance (ssNMR) spectroscopy has been exploited to elucidate the chemical nature of carbon species deposited on the surface of MWCNTs. Al(OTf)₃, a model Lewis acidic metal salt, has been successfully supported on sulfonic groups tethered to MWCNTs. This catalyst has been tested for C₆ sugar dehydration for the production of HMF in a tetrahydrofuran (THF)/water solvent system with good recyclability.