LAG TIME

The time lapse between the occurrence of an event (e.g. a climatic change, landuse change, a human intervention or an extreme climatic event) and the resulting effect. The concept is important, for example, in understanding the causal relationships involved in environmental change and in the prediction and mitigation of natural hazards. In the context of glacier variations in response to a climatic change, it is the time interval between the mass balance change and the maximum (or minimum) of the resulting glacier advance (or retreat).

[See alsolead and lag, reaction time, relaxation time, response time]