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Improvement of glacial lakes detection under shadow environment using ASTER data in Himalayas, Nepal

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Abstract

The detection of glacial lake change in the Himalayas, Nepal is extremely significant since the glacial lake change is one of the crucial indicators of global climate change in this area, where is the most sensitive area of the global climate changes. In the Himalayas, some of glacial lakes are covered by the dark mountains’ shadow because of their location. Therefore, these lakes can not be detected by conventional method such as Normalized Difference Water Index (NDWI), because the reflectance feature of shadowed glacial lake is different comparing to the ones which are located in the open flat area. The shadow causes two major problems: 1) glacial lakes which are covered by shadow completely result in underestimation of the number of glacial lakes; 2) glacial lakes which are partly identified are considered to undervalue the area of glacial lakes. The aim of this study is to develop a new model, named Detection of Shadowed Glacial Lakes (DSGL) model, to identify glacial lakes under the shadow environment by using Advanced Space-borne Thermal Emission and Reflection Radiometer (ASTER) data in the Himalayas, Nepal. The DSGL model is based on integration of two different modifications of NDWI, namely NDWIs model and NDWIshe model. NDWIs is defined as integration of the NDWI and slope analysis and used for detecting non-shadowed lake in the mountain area. The NDWIshe is proposed as a new methodology to overcome the weakness of NDWIs on identifying shadowed lakes in highly elevated mountainous area such as the Himalayas. The first step of the NDWIshe is to enhance the data from ASTER 1B using the histogram equalization (HE) method, and its outcome product is named ASTERhe. We used the ASTERhe for calculating the NDWIhe and the NDWIshe. Integrated with terrain analysis using Digital Elevation Model (DEM) data, the NDWIshe can be used to identify the shadowed glacial lakes in the Himalayas. NDWIs value of 0.41 is used to identify the glacier lake (NDWIs ≥ 0.41), and 0.3 of NDWIshe is used to identify the shadowed glacier lake (NDWIshe ≤ 0.3). The DSGL model was proved to be able to classify the glacial lakes more accurately, while the NDWI model had tendency to underestimate the presence of actual glacial lakes. Correct classification rate regarding the products from NDWI model and DSGL model were 57% and 99%, respectively. The results of this paper demonstrated that the DSGL model is promising to detect glacial lakes in the shadowed environment at high mountains.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Graduate School of Media and Governance, Keio University, Fujisawa, 2520882, Japan

    Wenbo Chen

  2. Chubu Institute for Advanced Studies, Chubu University, Kasugai, 4878501, Japan

    Hiromichi Fukui

  3. Research Institute of Environment and Information Sciences, Yokohama National University, Yokohama, 2408501, Japan

    Tomoko Doko

  4. JSPS Research Fellow, Tokyo, 1020083, Japan

    Tomoko Doko

  5. Institute of Remote Sensing Applications, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing, 100101, China

    Xingfa Gu

Authors
  1. Wenbo Chen
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  2. Hiromichi Fukui
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  3. Tomoko Doko
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  4. Xingfa Gu
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Correspondence to Wenbo Chen.

Additional information

Foundation item: Under the auspices of Taikichiro Mori Memorial Research Grants of Keio University (No. 19, 2010), Doctoral Students Research Support Program of Keio University (No. 87, 2010), Academic Frontier Fund’s ‘Integrated Research for Community Strategic Concept by Construction and Management of Digital Asia’ by Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology (MEXT) (No. 04F003, 2004—2008)

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Chen, W., Fukui, H., Doko, T. et al. Improvement of glacial lakes detection under shadow environment using ASTER data in Himalayas, Nepal. Chin. Geogr. Sci. 23, 216–226 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11769-012-0584-3

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11769-012-0584-3

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