Glacial lake inventory of high-mountain Asia in 1990 and 2018 derived from Landsat images

Abstract

Abstract. There is currently no glacial lake inventory data set for the entire high-mountain Asia (HMA) area. The definition and classification of glacial lakes remain controversial, presenting certain obstacles to extensive utilization of glacial lake inventory data. This study integrated glacier inventory data and 668 Landsat TM, ETM+, and OLI images and adopted manual visual interpretation to extract glacial lake boundaries within a 10 km buffer from glacier extent using ArcGIS and ENVI software, normalized difference water index maps, and Google Earth images. The theoretical and methodological basis for all processing steps including glacial lake definition and classification, lake boundary delineation, and uncertainty assessment is discussed comprehensively in the paper. Moreover, detailed information regarding the coding, location, perimeter and area, area error, type, time phase, source image information, and subregions of the located lakes is presented. It was established that 27 205 and 30 121 glacial lakes (size 0.0054–6.46 km2) in HMA covered a combined area of 1806.47±2.11 and 2080.12±2.28 km2 in 1990 and 2018, respectively. The data set is now available from the National Special Environment and Function of Observation and Research Stations Shared Service Platform (China): https://doi.org/10.12072/casnw.064.2019.db (Wang et al., 2019a).