Glacial lake inventory of High Mountain Asia (1990–2018) derived from Landsat images
Xin Wang, Xiaoyu Guo, Chengde Yang, Qionghuan Liu, Junfeng Wei, Yong Zhang, Shiyin Liu, Yanlin Zhang, Zongli Jiang, Zhiguang Tang
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 426 Landsat TM/ETM+/OLI images, and adopted manual visual interpretation to extract glacial lake boundaries within a 10-km buffer from glacier terminals 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 error assessment are discussed comprehensively in the paper. Moreover, detailed information regarding the coding, location, perimeter and area, area error, type, time phase, source image information, and sub-regions of the located lakes is presented. It was established that 26,089 and 28,953 glacial lakes in HMA, with sizes of 0.0054–5.83 km2, covered a combined area of 1692.74 ± 231.44 and 1955.94 ± 259.68 km2 in 1990 and 2018, respectively. The data set now is available at the National Special Environment and Function of Observation and Research Stations Shared Service Platform (China) at http://dx.doi.org/10.12072/casnw.064.2019.db (Wang et al., 2019a).