Abstract
Landsat satellite images were used to map and monitor the snow-covered areas of four glaciers with different aspects (Passu: 36.473°N, 74.766°E; Momhil: 36.394°N, 75.085°E; Trivor: 36.249°N, 74.968°E; and Kunyang: 36.083°N, 75.288°E) in the upper Indus basin, northern Pakistan, from 1990-2014. The snow-covered areas of the selected glaciers were identified and classified using supervised and rule-based image analysis techniques in three different seasons. Accuracy assessment of the classified images indicated that the supervised classification technique performed slightly better than the rule-based technique. Snow-covered areas on the selected glaciers were generally reduced during the study period but at different rates. Glaciers reached maximum areal snow coverage in winter and pre-monsoon seasons and minimum areal snow coverage in monsoon seasons, with the lowest snow-covered area occurring in August and September. The snow-covered area on Passu glacier decreased by 24.50%, 3.15% and 11.25% in the pre-monsoon, monsoon and post-monsoon seasons, respectively. Similarly, the other three glaciers showed notable decreases in snow-covered area during the pre- and post-monsoon seasons; however, no clear changes were observed during monsoon seasons. During pre-monsoon seasons, the eastward-facing glacier lost comparatively more snow-covered area than the westward-facing glacier. The average seasonal glacier surface temperature calculated from the Landsat thermal band showed negative correlations of -0.67, -0.89, -0.75 and -0.77 with the average seasonal snow-covered areas of the Passu, Momhil, Trivor and Kunyang glaciers, respectively, during pre-monsoon seasons. Similarly, the air temperature collected from a nearby meteorological station showed an increasing trend, indicating that the snow-covered area reduction in the region was largely due to climate warming.
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Acknowledgements
This work was funded by National Natural Science Foundation of China (41421061, 41630754), Chinese Academy of Sciences (KJZD-EW-G03-04), the State Key Laboratory of Cryospheric Science (SKLCS-ZZ-2017). We thank to the Pakistan Meteorological Department and the Water and Power Development Authority for contributing meteorological data. The authors also wish to thank United State Geological Survey (USGS) for providing Landsat images. Thanks to anonymous reviewers for their valuable and honorable comments.
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Gul, C., Kang, Sc., Ghauri, B. et al. Using Landsat images to monitor changes in the snow-covered area of selected glaciers in northern Pakistan. J. Mt. Sci. 14, 2013–2027 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11629-016-4097-x
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11629-016-4097-x