We analyse data on solar radiation measured with an automatic weather station on Morteratschgletscher, Switzerland, for the period 1 October 1995–30 September 1996. The station is in the lower ablation zone. Due to shading by surrounding mountains and atmospheric attenuation, only 49% of the annual extraterrestrial irradiance (mean: 292 W m−2) reaches the glacier surface. About 48% of this is absorbed at the surface (mean: 79 W m−2; annual albedo of 0.53). We present a simple albedo scheme for

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... se in glacier mass-balance models. We fit the model to the 1 year dataset by optimizing five control parameters (optimal values in brackets): albedo of snow (0.75), albedo of firn (0.53), albedo of ice (0.34), e-folding constant for effect of ageing on snow albedo (21.9 days) and e-folding constant for effect of snow depth on albedo (3.2 cm). The input consists of daily albedo, snow depth and dates of snowfall events. The correlation coefficient between observed and simulated albedo is 0.931, the corresponding rms difference being 0.067.