Abstract
Outside of the polar regions, the Hindukush-Karakoram-Himalaya (HKH) has the highest cluster of snow cover and glaciers, which offer various ecosystem services, including water, to the billions of people who live across this region. A glacier inventory is a vital prerequisite for researching a wide range of diverse phenomena, processes, and effects of such glacier changes across these regions. In recent years, several glacier inventories are available for the HKH region, namely, the Geological Survey of India (GSI) Glacier Inventory, the Space Application Center (SAC) Glacier Inventory, the International Centre for Integrated Mountain Development (ICIMOD) Glacier Inventory, Randolph Glacier Inventory (RGI), and Glacier Area Mapping for Discharge from the Asian Mountains (GAMDAM) Glacier Inventory (GGI). Prior to being used for any glacier investigations, it’s critical to evaluate the quality and consistency of these inventory datasets. Thus, the current study provides a detailed quality assessment of all these available glacier inventories by comparing them with the detailed Ravi basin glacier inventory (RBGI). The comprehensive RBGI was created using the Landsat Enhanced Thematic Mapper (ETM+) images (2002) with a supplement of medium- to high-resolution imagery and field validations. The RBGI consists of 285 glaciers in 2002 with a mapped area of 164.5 ± 7.5 km2. There are 71 glaciers out of the total glaciers that have debris-covered parts, which occupy 36.1 ± 2.1 km2 (~22% of the whole area covered by glaciers). Large variations were found in the glacial area (ranging from 202 to 112.7 km2) and a total number of glaciers (ranging from 299 to 192) mapped within the Ravi basin among these available glacier inventories. With few spatial differences in the total number of the glacier, their extent, and median elevation, it was found that the recently updated GGI inventory, which is incorporated into the revised version of RGI V6 for the Himalayan region, is most comparable to our RBGI inventory. Likely causes of the significant difference among these inventories include standard glacier definition (minimum area of glacier mapping and headwall definition), misinterpretation of the seasonal snow cover, demarcation of debris-covered areas, and consequences of excluding glacier sections in the shaded regions.
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Acknowledgments
The authors acknowledge ICIMOD, GGI, and RGI to provide digital outlines for the research community. We appreciate the anonymous reviewer’s constructive comments, which helped us to enhance the manuscript’s content. The corresponding author thanks the SERB, New Delhi, for its financial assistance with SERB-DST Project No. PDF/2017/002717 [NPDF Scheme].
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Ahmed, I., Sharma, V., Kumar, R., Lal, D., Bhandari, R., Chand, P. (2023). Assessment of Existing Himalayan Glacier Inventories for Glacier Studies: A Case Study from the Ravi Basin of North-Western Himalaya (India). In: Sharma, S., Kuniyal, J.C., Chand, P., Singh, P. (eds) Climate Change Adaptation, Risk Management and Sustainable Practices in the Himalaya. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-24659-3_6
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