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Inventory of Glaciers in the Himalayan Region: A Study Through Field Survey and Sentinel 2B Based Imagery Analysis

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Environmental Pollution and Natural Resource Management

Abstract

Glaciers play a major role in the human ecosystem. Since they are the primary source of our freshwater reserve, glaciers are very much crucial to sustaining life on the planet. Moreover, its highly sensitive nature to the changes in the environment and climatic conditions, glaciers also act as a major indicator for climate change. Hence, the inventory and monitoring of glaciers have significant importance in today's world. Rapid deglaciation primarily caused by the global increase in temperature can lead to a rise in the sea level to an extreme level. Remote sensing techniques help the researchers a lot to identify and monitor the changes that occurred to the most physically inaccessible glaciers. Normalized Differential Indexes like Normalised Differential Snow Index (NDSI) can help the researchers to identify the snow cover regions and also to make an inventory of the glaciers supported by other techniques. While monitoring snow cover and glacier-covered regions, researchers need to understand different characteristics such as knowledge of reflectance characteristics, spatial resolution requirement, repeat data acquisition duration, sensor saturation, discrimination toward snow clouds, and monitoring of snow cover under mountain shadow.

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Correspondence to Arvind Pandey .

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Pandey, A. et al. (2022). Inventory of Glaciers in the Himalayan Region: A Study Through Field Survey and Sentinel 2B Based Imagery Analysis. In: Bahukhandi, K.D., Kamboj, N., Kamboj, V. (eds) Environmental Pollution and Natural Resource Management . Springer Proceedings in Earth and Environmental Sciences. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-05335-1_15

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