Glacier changes in the Chhombo Chhu Watershed of the Tista basin between 1975 and 2018, the Sikkim Himalaya, India
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Published:2021-06-17
Issue:6
Volume:13
Page:2923-2944
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ISSN:1866-3516
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Container-title:Earth System Science Data
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language:en
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Short-container-title:Earth Syst. Sci. Data
Author:
Chowdhury ArindamORCID, Sharma Milap Chand, Kumar De SunilORCID, Debnath ManasiORCID
Abstract
Abstract. Glaciers of the Tista basin represent an important water source
for mountain communities and a large population downstream. The article
presents observable changes in the Chhombo Chhu Watershed (CCW) glacier area
of the Tista basin, the Sikkim Himalaya. The CCW contains 74 glaciers
(> 0.02 km2) with a mean glacier size of 0.61 km2. We
determined changes in glaciers from the declassified Hexagon Keyhole-9 (KH-9) (1975),
Landsat 5 Thematic Mapper (TM) (1989), Landsat 7 Enhanced Thematic Mapper Plus (ETM+) (2000), Landsat 5 TM (2010), and
Sentinel-2A (2018) images. The total glacier area in 1975 was 62.6 ± 0.7 km2; and by 2018, the area had decreased to 44.8 ± 1.5 km2, an area loss of 17.9 ± 1.7 km2 (0.42 ± 0.04 km2 a−1). Clean glaciers exhibited more area loss of 11.8 ± 1.2 km2 (0.27 ± 0.03 km2 a−1) than partially
debris-covered and maximally debris-covered glaciers. The area loss is 5.0 ± 0.4 km2 (0.12 ± 0.01 km2 a−1) for partially
covered glaciers and 1.0 ± 0.1 km2 (−0.02 ± 0.002 km2 a−1) for maximally covered glaciers. The glacier area loss in the CCW of
the Sikkim Himalaya is 0.62 ± 0.5 km2 a−1 during 2000–2010,
and it is 0.77 ± 0.6 km2 a−1 during 2010–2018. Field
investigations of selected glaciers and climatic records also support the
glacier recession in the CCW due to a significant increase in temperature
(0.25 ∘C a−1) and more or less static precipitation since
1995. The dataset is now available from the Zenodo web portal:
https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.4457183 (Chowdhury et al., 2021).
Publisher
Copernicus GmbH
Subject
General Earth and Planetary Sciences
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