A new glacier inventory for the Karakoram-Pamir region

Abstract:

High-quality glacier inventories are required as a reference dataset to determine glacier changes and model their reaction to climate change, among others. In particular in High Mountain Asia such an inventory was missing for several heavily glacierized regions with reportedly strongly changing glaciers. As a contribution to GLIMS and the Randolph Glacier Inventory (RGI) we have mapped all glaciers in the Karakoram and Pamir region within the framework of ESAs Glaciers_cci project. Glacier mapping was performed using the band ratio method (TM3/TM5) and manual editing of Landsat TM/ETM+ imagery acquired around the year 2000. The mapping was challenged by frequent seasonal snow at high elevations, debris-covered glacier tongues, and several surging glaciers. We addressed the snow issue by utilizing multi-temporal imagery and improved manual mapping of debris-covered glacier tongues with ALOS PALSAR coherence images. Slow disintegration of glacier tongues after a surge (leaving still-connected dead ice) results in a difficult identification of the terminus and assignment of entities. Drainage divides were derived from the ASTER GDEM II and manually corrected to calculate topographic parameters. All glaciers larger 0.02 km² cover an area of about 21,700 km² in the Karakoram and about 11,800 km² in the Pamir region. Most glaciers are in the 0.1-0.5 km² size class for Pamir, whereas for the Karakoram they are in the class <0.1 km². Glaciers between 1 and 5 km² contribute more than 30% to the total area in Pamir, whereas for the Karakoram region it is only 17%. The mean glacier elevation in the Karakoram (Pamir) region is 5426 (4874) m. A comparison with other recently published inventories reveals differences in the interpretation of glacier extents (mainly in the accumulation region) that would lead to large area changes if unconsidered for change assessment across different inventories.