A national inventory of glacial lakes in Nepal from optical satellite data, tracing how their number and area changed over four decades.
Authors
Nitesh Khadka, Guoqing Zhang and Sudeep Thakuri
Published in
Remote Sensing 10(12): 1913, 2018
About the study
As Himalayan glaciers shrink, glacial lakes are growing in number and size. This study built a remote-sensing inventory of glacial lakes of at least 0.0036 km² across the Nepal Himalaya for 2017, and mapped the same region at ten-year intervals back to 1977.
Key findings
- The number of lakes rose from 606 (55.5 km²) in 1977 to 1,541 (81.0 km²) in 2017
- Between 1987 and 2017, proglacial lakes in contact with glacier ice changed most, growing 181% in number and 82% in area
- The inventory gives a national baseline for glacial lake hazard assessment