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| Titel |
An ALOS-derived glacier inventory of the Bhutan Himalaya |
| VerfasserIn |
Hiroto Nagai, Koji Fujita, Takayuki Nuimura, Akiko Sakai |
| Konferenz |
EGU General Assembly 2013
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| Medientyp |
Artikel
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| Sprache |
Englisch
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| Digitales Dokument |
PDF |
| Erschienen |
In: GRA - Volume 15 (2013) |
| Datensatznummer |
250078958
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| Zusammenfassung |
| Glacier inventory provides fundamental information of glacier settings such as number, area,
and horizontal/altitudinal distribution, which make possible to study management of water
resources, glacial response to climate change, and glacier-related hazards. In the Bhutan
Himalaya, heavily debris-covered surface and seasonal snow cover under the humid
climate hamper automated mapping of glaciers. We present a novel glacier inventory
manually delineated from high resolution (2.5 m) ALOS-PRISM images along the
Bhutan Himalaya including Tibetan side. We delineated 1273 glaciers with area of
1408.3 km2, in which 210 debris-covered glaciers with area of 951.2 km2 were
identified.
Scatter plot of top and terminus altitudes of these glaciers shows that the termini of
debris-covered glaciers tend to be located at lower altitude than those of debris-free
glaciers. Classifying surface aspect into eight directions, surface of the debris-free
glaciers tends to be exposed northward (16.7%) while the southwestward surface is
minimum (9.2%). No remarkable aspect tendency is found for the debris-covered
glaciers. We compare the locations of debris-free glaciers with annual precipitation of
TRMM 3B43 data. Median altitude, at which glacier surface is divided into two equal
areas obviously increases northward (toward Tibet) along latitude. Additionally
the median altitude averaged over basin scale (~2500 km2) shows a significant
negative correlation against the annual precipitation (r= -0.48, p< 0.05). Our results
suggest that the high latitudinal gradient of annual precipitation crossing the Bhutan
Himalaya contrasts the glacier altitudinal distribution within a scale of 100 km. |
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