Quantification of glacier mass budgets in the Karakoram region of Upper Indus Basin during the early twenty-first century

Wu, Kunpeng; Liu, Shiyin; Jiang, Zongli; Liu, Qiao; Zhu, Yanzi; Yi, Ying; Xie, Fuming; Tahir, Adnan Ahmad; Saifullah, Muhammad

doi:10.1016/j.jhydrol.2021.127095

Cited by 15 publications

(9 citation statements)

References 79 publications

Supporting

Mentioning

Contrasting

Order By: Relevance

“…Due to global warming in recent decades, changes in glacier-related resources and hazards present threats to the safety of critical infrastructure and the sustainable livelihoods of local communities living within the basin (Immerzeel et al, 2020;Bazai et al, 2021;Gao et al, 2021). In the past few decades, remote-sensing-based mass balance, glacier flow, and surge or advance characteristics indicate that the glaciers in Karakoram are exhibiting anomalous behaviour (Hewitt, 2005;Gardelle et al, 2012;Kääb et al, 2012;Bolch et al, 2017;Dehecq et al, 2018;Farinotti et al, 2020;Wu et al, 2020Wu et al, , 2021.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Interdecadal glacier inventories in the Karakoram since the 1990s

Xie

Liu

Gao

et al. 2023

Earth Syst. Sci. Data

Self Cite

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Abstract. Multi-temporal glacier inventories provide key information about the glaciers, their characteristics, and changes and are inevitable for glacier modelling and investigating geodetic mass changes. However, to date, no consistent multi-temporal glacier inventory for the whole of the Karakoram exists, negatively affecting the monitoring of spatio-temporal variations in glaciers' geometric parameters and their related applications. We used a semi-automatic method combining automatic segmentation and manual correction and produced a multi-temporal Karakoram glacier inventory (KGI) compiled from Landsat TM/ETM+/OLI (Thematic Mapper, Enhanced Thematic Mapper Plus, and Operational Land Imager) images for the 1990s, 2000s, 2010s, and 2020s. Our assessments using independent multiple digitisation of 37 glaciers show that the KGI is sufficiently accurate, with an overall uncertainty of ±3.68 %. We also performed uncertainty evaluation for the contiguous glacier polygons using a buffer of half a pixel, which resulted in an average mapping uncertainty of ±5.21 %. We calculated more than 20 attributes for each glacier, including coordinates, area, supraglacial debris area, date information, and topographic parameters derived from the ASTER GDEM (Advanced Spaceborne Thermal Emission and Reflection Radiometer global digital elevation model). According to KGI-2020s, approximately 10 500 alpine glaciers (>0.01 km2 each) cover an area of 22 510±828 km2 of which 10.18±0.38 % (2290±84 km2) is covered by supraglacial debris. Over the past 3 decades, the glaciers experienced a loss of clean ice and/or snow area but a gain in supraglacial debris. Supraglacial debris cover has increased by 17.63±1.44 % (343.30±27.95 km2), while non-debris-covered glaciers decreased by 1.56±0.24 % (319.85±49.92 km2). The total glacier area was relatively stable and showed only a slight insignificant increase of 23.45±28.85 km2 (0.10±0.13 %). The glacier area has declined by 3.27±0.24 % in the eastern Karakoram, while the glacier area slightly increased in central (0.65±0.10 %) and western Karakoram (1.26±0.11 %). Supraglacial debris has increased over the whole of Karakoram, especially in areas above 4200 m a.s.l. (above sea level), showing an upward shift. The glacier area changes were characterised by strong spatial heterogeneity, influenced by surging and advancing glaciers. However, due to global warming, the glaciers are on average retreating. This is in particular true for small and debris-free glaciers. The multi-temporal KGI data are available at the National Cryosphere Desert Data Center of China: https://doi.org/10.12072/ncdc.glacier.db2386.2022 (F. Xie et al., 2022).

show abstract

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Interdecadal glacier inventories in the Karakoram since the 1990s

Xie

Liu

Gao

et al. 2023

Earth Syst. Sci. Data

Self Cite

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

“…1). The majority of the hydrological budget of Indus River comes from precipitation, snowmelt, and glaciers, but their relative contribution varies among the major contributing tributaries (Bookhagen and Burbank 2010;Wu et al, 2021). The Upper Indus catchment receives precipitation from two distinct climatic systems, the WD and the ISM, over its foreland and highlands in the northwest (NW) Himalayas (Bookhagen and Burbank 2006;.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Geomorphic imprint of high mountain floods: Insight from the 2022 hydrological extreme across the Upper Indus terrain in NW Himalayas

Kashyap,

Cook,

Behera

2024

Preprint

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Abstract. The interaction of tectonics, surface processes, and climate extremes impacts how the landscape responds to extreme hydrological events. An anomalous precipitation event in 2022 occurred during the monsoon season along the lower reaches of the Upper Indus River, resulting in short-lived high-magnitude flooding and socioeconomic disruption downstream. To understand the spatial relationship between the geomorphic response and climatic controls of this flood event, as well as their primary triggers, we performed a landscape analysis using topographic metrics and quantified the causal association between hydro-climatic variables. Temperature anomalies in upstream glaciated sub-catchments had a considerable impact on snow cover distribution, based on our observations. As snow cover changed, glacial melt runoff rose, contributing to increased fluvial stream power after traversing higher-order reaches. The higher-order reaches of the Upper Indus River received an anomalously high amount of precipitation, which, when combined with substantial glacial and melt discharge, contributed to an extreme flood across the high-relief steep gradient channels. The flood-affected regions had a high mean basin ksn and SL-index, including numerous spikes in their magnitudes along their channel profiles downstream. To determine how the lower reaches of the Upper Indus River responded to this flood event, we employed the Enhanced Vegetation Index (EVI) and Normalized Difference Water Index (NDWI) as change indicator metrics. We observed an inverse causal influence of NDWI on EVI and a statistically significant relationship between anomalous stream power and relative EVI, suggesting that downstream channel morphology changed rapidly during this episodic event and highlighting EVI as a useful indicator of geomorphic change. We suggest that this extreme flood event is a result of the interaction of anomalous glacial melt and anomalous precipitation over a high-relief landscape, with a certain causal connection with anomalous temperature over the event duration. The synoptic observations suggest that this meteorological condition involves the interaction of the Indian Summer Monsoon (ISM) and Western Disturbance (WD) moisture fluxes. However, the geomorphic consequences of such anomalous monsoon periods, as well as their influence on long-term landscape change, are still unclear.

show abstract

“…Mountain glaciers are shrinking rapidly (Hugonnet et al, 2021), altering regional hydrology (Pritchard, 2019), raising global sea levels (WCRP Global Sea Level Budget Group, 2018), and increasing the risk of natural hazards (Shukla and Sen, 2021;Zheng et al, 2021), and they are among the most climate-sensitive constituents of the world's natural water towers (Immerzeel et al, 2019). Under the influence of global climate change, studies on glacier area changes (Sommer et al, 2020;Li et al, 2021), ice thickness (Farinotti et al, 2019), mass balance (Zemp et al, 2019;Vargo et al, 2020;Wu et al, 2021;Mankoff et al, 2021), ice velocity field (Thogersen et al, 2019;Solgaard et al, 2021;Franke et al, 2022), the impact of debris cover (Scherler et al, 2018;Shukla et al, 2020;Herreid and Pellicciotti, 2020), glacier meltwater (Noel et al, 2020), sediment release (Aciego et al, 2015;Li et al, 2019), and related hazards (Zhou et al, 2021b;Stuart-Smith et al, 2021;Kääb et al, 2021) are essential for global water resources supply assessment and disaster prevention and reduction.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

A new global dataset of mountain glacier centerlines and lengths

Zhang

Zhou

et al. 2022

Earth Syst. Sci. Data

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Abstract. The length of a glacier is a key determinant of its geometry and is an important parameter in glacier inventories and modeling; glacier centerlines are the lines along which the main flow of glaciers takes place and, thus, are crucial inputs for many glaciological applications. In this study, the centerlines and maximum lengths of global glaciers were extracted using a self-designed automatic extraction algorithm based on the latest global glacier inventory data, digital elevation model (DEM), and European allocation theory. The accuracy of the dataset was evaluated through random visual assessments and comparisons with the Randolph Glacier Inventory (RGI) version 6.0. A total of 8.25 % of the outlines of the RGI were excluded, including 10 764 erroneous glacier polygons, 7174 ice caps, and 419 nominal glaciers. A total of 198 137 glacier centerlines were generated, accounting for 99.74 % of the input glaciers. The accuracy of glacier centerlines was 89.68 %. A comparison between the dataset and the previous dataset suggested that most glacier centerlines were slightly longer than those in RGI v6.0, meaning that the maximum lengths of some glaciers had been likely underestimated in the past. The constructed dataset comprises 17 sub-datasets, including global glacier centerlines, maximum lengths, and DEMs, all of which can be found at https://doi.org/10.11922/sciencedb.01643 (Zhang and Zhang, 2022).

show abstract

Quantification of glacier mass budgets in the Karakoram region of Upper Indus Basin during the early twenty-first century

Cited by 15 publications

References 79 publications

Interdecadal glacier inventories in the Karakoram since the 1990s

Interdecadal glacier inventories in the Karakoram since the 1990s

Geomorphic imprint of high mountain floods: Insight from the 2022 hydrological extreme across the Upper Indus terrain in NW Himalayas

A new global dataset of mountain glacier centerlines and lengths

Contact Info

Product

Resources

About