Abstract
Abstract. There is currently no glacial lake inventory data set for the entire high-mountain Asia (HMA) area. The definition and classification of glacial lakes remain controversial, presenting certain obstacles to extensive utilization of glacial lake inventory data. This study integrated glacier inventory data and 668 Landsat TM, ETM+, and OLI images and adopted manual visual interpretation to extract glacial lake boundaries within a 10 km buffer from glacier extent using ArcGIS and ENVI software, normalized difference water index maps, and Google Earth images. The theoretical and methodological basis for all processing steps including glacial lake definition and classification, lake boundary delineation, and uncertainty assessment is discussed comprehensively in the paper. Moreover, detailed information regarding the coding, location, perimeter and area, area error, type, time phase, source image information, and subregions of the located lakes is presented. It was established that 27 205 and 30 121 glacial lakes (size 0.0054–6.46 km2) in HMA covered a combined area of 1806.47±2.11 and 2080.12±2.28 km2 in 1990 and 2018, respectively. The data set is now available from the National Special Environment and Function of Observation and Research Stations Shared Service Platform (China): https://doi.org/10.12072/casnw.064.2019.db (Wang et al., 2019a).
Highlights
Against the background of climate warming and the consequent widespread mass loss of glaciers in alpine regions, increasing volumes of glacial meltwater are being released
We developed our glacial lake inventory of high-mountain Asia (HMA) based on 668 high-quality images selected from more than 1800 Landsat images with a 30 m spatial resolution derived from the websites of the United States Geological Survey and Geospatial Data Cloud
Distances of 2, 5, 10, and 20 km were considered by Zhang et al (2015). They found that a distance of 10 km from a modern glacier terminal might be a reasonable guide to glaciation extent and a threshold suitable for a glacial lake inventory of the Tibetan Plateau
Summary
Against the background of climate warming and the consequent widespread mass loss of glaciers in alpine regions, increasing volumes of glacial meltwater are being released. Multi-source remote sensing imagery has been used to compile glacial lake inventories for regions of the Tibetan Plateau (Zhang et al, 2015), the Tien Shan (Wang et al, 2013), the Himalaya (Gardelle et al, 2011; Nie et al, 2017), the Hengduan Mountains (Wang et al, 2017), Uzbekistan (Petrov et al, 2017), Pakistan (Senese et al, 2018), and HMA, excluding the Altai and Sayan (Chen et al, 2020) These inventories have proved an important data resource both for revealing the spatio-temporal characteristics of glacial lakes and for understanding the response of glacial lakes to the effects of climate change in these regions. The objectives of this study were to fill this knowledge gap by producing a glacial lake inventory data set for HMA derived from Landsat images and to provide fundamental data for water resource evaluation, assessment of glacial lake outburst floods, and glacier hydrology research in the mountain cryosphere region
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