Investigating changes in snow cover in the center of Bamyan province using satellite images

Abstract

Studying and measuring changes in snow levels is very important as one of the important sources of water supply. Due to the harsh physical conditions of mountainous environments, it is not possible to make permanent measurements on the ground to estimate the sources of blue snow and create a database. For this reason, it is very important to use satellite images to identify snow catchment areas and evaluate its changes. The data used in this study are Landsat 8 satellite images of the OLI sensor in January and March of 2016 and 2023, the center of Bamyan province. The method used in this study is supervised classification using maximum likelihood algorithm. Examining the maps related to changes in snow cover in January showed that during the studied period, the lowest amount of snow cover is for the month of January 2023, which is 1238/34 square kilometers, while in January 2016, the amount of snow cover is 1264/74 square kilometers and the snow cover will reach 1116/11 square kilometers in March 2016 and 1215/72 square kilometers in March 2023 respectively. This issue shows the changes in the amount of snow cover in the central region of Bamyan province during 8 years and shows the vulnerability of water sources related to snow melting in this region.