Abstract
As the Third Pole of the Earth and the Water Tower of Asia, Tibetan Plateau (TP) nurtures large numbers of glacial lakes, which are sensitive to global climate change. These lakes modulate the freshwater ecosystem in the region, but concurrently pose severe threats to the valley population by means of sudden glacial lake outbursts and consequent floods (GLOFs). Lack of high-resolution multi-temporal inventory of glacial lakes in TP hampers a better understanding and prediction of the future trend and risk of glacial lakes. Here, we created a multi-temporal inventory of glacial lakes in TP using 30 years record of satellite images (1990–2019), and discussed their characteristics and spatio-temporal evolution over the years. Results showed that their number and area had increased by 3285 and 258.82 km2, respectively in the last 3 decades. We noticed that different regions of TP exhibited varying change rates in glacial lake size; some regions even showed decreasing trend such as the western Pamir and the eastern Hindu Kush because of reduced rainfall rates. The mapping uncertainty is about 17.5 %, lower than other available datasets, thus making our inventory, a reliable one for the spatio-temporal evolution analysis of glacial lakes in TP. Our lake inventory data are freely available at https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.5574289 (Dou et al., 2021); it can help to study climate change-glacier-glacial lake-GLOF interactions in the third pole and serve input to various hydro-climatic studies.
Highlights
The Third Pole of the Earth, Tibetan Plateau (TP) consists the most significant number and area of glaciers outside polar regions (Yao et al, 2012a)
With the same or larger study area (Tibetan Plateau or High Mountain Asia), equal to minimum threshold area (0.0081 km2), and definition of the location of a glacial lake, we found that 295 the glacial datasets of Chen et al (2021) and Wang et al (2020) are analogous and used to make a comparative analysis with our inventory
We carefully examined these three datasets and found five reasons that may lead to significant differences: (i) To obtain a more accurate distribution range of glacial lakes, the GAMDAM glacier inventory with higher quality was selected in our study to create the buffer of 10 km of distance from the glacier terminus to lakes (Nuimura et al, 2015), while the other two datasets applied 305 Randolph Glacier Inventory (RGI) and other glacier inventories
Summary
The Third Pole of the Earth, Tibetan Plateau (TP) consists the most significant number and area of glaciers outside polar regions (Yao et al, 2012a). With the aggravated climate change in the anthropocene, the retreat and loss of glacier mass increased in many parts of the TP (Bolch et al, 2012; Brun et al, 2017; Gardner et al, 2013; Kääb et al, 2015). Many glacial lakes form in the low-lying land, such as in depressions and troughs, and gradually expand with precipitation or glacial melt supply (Clague and Evans, 2000; Mool et al, 2001; Song et al, 2016; Wang et al, 2020). Glacial lakes are both temporary reservoirs of glacial meltwater and potential sources of flooding (Wang et al, 2020). Due to 30 the expansion of glacial lakes, glacial lake outburst floods (GLOFs) have become increasingly frequent in recent years
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