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Mapping of Dangerous Glacial Lakes by Using Systematic Extraction Approach in Different Catchments of Upper Indus Basin (UIB) Pakistan

Syed Hammad Ali

Abstract


The glaciers are nature's most valuable fresh water resource for irrigation, industry, and hydroelectric growth, as well as for the present and future needs of millions of people who live downstream. Numerous of the waterways in the HKH region receive a significant percentage of ice melt water from this solid reservoir. Many of the glaciers which consist of massive amount of permanent snow and ice are found to generate several glacial lakes. However, these glaciers are losing mass due to hasten global warming. Rapid water buildup in these glacial lakes, especially in those near retreating glaciers, can cause their vulnerable embankment "dams" to suddenly fail. Glacial Lake Outburst Floods (GLOF) often result in massive flows of water and debris that have catastrophic downstream repercussions. Understanding of this resource seems an exceptional requirement for future planning for water resources and flood hazards. This paper provides comprehensive information about the glacial lakes in the different catchments of UIB and also provides information upon the distribution of glacial lakes and providing baseline data for further investigation of glacial lakes, GLOF hazards and risk assessment, and mitigation measures. This inventory of glacial lakes is prepared using reliable uniform and single source data with a semi-automatic method using RS/GIS. For the consistency of glacial lakes data, Satellite images obtained at same instant of time used to delineate glacial lakes boundary. The glacial lake boundaries were delineated using an automatic method on Landsat images from the year 2008 ± 2 years and also considering the data of 2015 + 2 years. The automatic method to delineate the glacial lake boundaries by defining the threshold condition of band ratio images made the process of mapping and monitoring of glacial lakes faster. It is challenging to apply the method as it is difficult to obtain good quality images with minimum amount of snow cover, cloud cover, and shadow portion so some of the lakes were manually digitized by validating on high resolution images in Google Earth as well as comparing with previous available inventory data. This inventory includes maximum numbers of lakes surrounding the glaciers.

 


Keywords


Glacial Lakes, Normalized Difference Water Index (NDWI), Risk assessment

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References


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