Abstract
Glaciers in the northern Pakistan are a distinctive source of freshwater for the irrigation, drinking and industrial water supplies of the people living in those regions and downstream. These glaciers are under a direct global warming impact as indicated in many previous studies. In this study, we estimated the glacier dynamics in terms of Equilibrium Line Altitude (ELA), mass balance and the snout position variation using remote sensing data between 2001 and 2018. Six glaciers, having area ≥ 20 km2 each, situated in the Chitral region (Hindukush Mountains) were investigated in this study. Digital Elevation Model (DEM) and available cloud-free continuous series of Landsat and Sentinel the entire study area was a retreat of -231 ± 140 m. No obvious relationship was found between the glacier variation trends and the available gauged climatic data possibly due to the presence of debris cover in ablation zones of all the studied glaciers which provides insulation and reduces the immediate climatic effects.
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25 July 2020
The article Spatio-temporal changes in the six major glaciers of the Chitral River basin (Hindukush Region of Pakistan) between 2001 and 2018, written by Jawaria GUL, Sher MUHAMMAD, LIU Shi-yin, Siddique ULLAH, Shakeel AHMAD, Huma HAYAT and Adnan Ahmad TAHIR, was originally published Online First without Open Access. After publication in volume 17, issue 3, page 572-587, the author decided to opt for Open Choice and to make the article an Open Access publication. Therefore, the copyright of the article has been changed to © The Author(s) 2020 and the article is forthwith distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits use, duplication, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license, and indicate if changes were made. The original version of this article has been revised due to a retrospective Open Access order.
25 July 2020
The article Spatio-temporal changes in the six major glaciers of the Chitral River basin (Hindukush Region of Pakistan) between 2001 and 2018, written by Jawaria GUL, Sher MUHAMMAD, LIU Shi-yin, Siddique ULLAH, Shakeel AHMAD, Huma HAYAT and Adnan Ahmad TAHIR, was originally published Online First without Open Access. After publication in volume 17, issue 3, page 572-587, the author decided to opt for Open Choice and to make the article an Open Access publication. Therefore, the copyright of the article has been changed to - The Author(s) 2020 and the article is forthwith distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits use, duplication, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license, and indicate if changes were made. The original version of this article has been revised due to a retrospective Open Access order.
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Acknowledgments
Financial support for this research work by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (NSFC) and ICIMOD (Grant no. 41761144075) is highly acknowledged. Authors thank the United States Geological Survey, European Space Agency and Copernicus for providing the Landsat and Sentinel satellite data free of cost for this study. The authors extend their thanks to the Water and Power Development Authority (WAPDA) and the Pakistan Meteorological Department (PMD) for contributing their hydrological and meteorological data, respectively. We are grateful to the anonymous reviewers whose comments and suggestions significantly improved the manuscript.
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Spatio-temporal changes in the six major glaciers of the Chitral River basin (Hindukush Region of Pakistan) between 2001 and 2018
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Gul, J., Muhammad, S., Liu, Sy. et al. Spatio-temporal changes in the six major glaciers of the Chitral River basin (Hindukush Region of Pakistan) between 2001 and 2018. J. Mt. Sci. 17, 572–587 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11629-019-5728-9
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11629-019-5728-9