AN ASSESSMENT OF CHANGES IN EXTENT OF GLACIERS IN KUMAUN HIMALAYAS

Abstract

Recent decades have witnessed significant impacts from climate change. Due to climate change glacier are retreating, shrinking, and disappearing worldwide. Studying glaciers from a wide range of remote sensing platforms and techniques has become an expanding field over the past decade. This study presents an assessment of changes in extent of glaciers in kumaun Himalayas. In this study, Remote sensed satellite based datasets have been used for extent of glacier. Landsat 5 TM, landsat 7 ETM+ and landsat 8 OLI/TIRS were taken and studies for three time periods, 1997, 2008 and 2017. The visual interpretation methods were applied to identify the glacier & their extent using multitemporal data. Cartosat version -3 DEM was used to identify the topography of the study area. The result depicts that Glacier area in the current study of the kumaun Himalaya for the year 1997, 2008, and 2017 are 435.15km2 , 290.7km2 , and 239.85km2.The glaciers over the years are showing a decline in their area. In this study a challenge has been made to quantitatively define the glacier extent and their rate of decrease.