Glacier facies characterisation in transboundary West Sikkim Himalaya from TerraSAR-X; GLCM based classification approach

Abstract

ABSTRACT The proposed facies classification approach uses three features of the GLCM with multitemporal X-band SAR data of TerraSAR-X combined with k-means clustering. This approach was tested on 15 transboundary Himalayan glaciers. They were classified into six facies namely debris, dry snow, wet snow, bare ice, percolation zone 1 and percolation zone 2 and the covered areas for these classes are 20.56%, 12.50%, 20.26%, 13.16%, 25.49% and 8.03% of total area respectively. After classification, the signature for classes are validated using the benchmark outline of East Rathong glacier, India. The accuracy achieved is 89.56% with negligible variance and kappa of 0.87.