| Term: | Kinematic method |
| Definition: | Any method of determining the mass balance that involves measurement or calculation of glacier flow, including the flux-divergence method, the kinematic-equation method and methods in which the mass balance is determined as the sum of the discharge through a cross section and the surface mass balance of the region upglacier from the cross section. Information about density is needed to convert the volumetric fluxes obtained by kinematic methods to mass fluxes. |