Title:

An Updated Inventory of Glacial Lakes in the Upper Indus Basin (UIB), Pakistan

Glaciated mountain regions have considerable vulnerability to the impacts of climate change. The fragile ecosystems are already experiencing more frequent and intense disasters, including glacial lake outburst floods (GLOFs). With the growing impacts of climate change on glacial environments, reliable and latest information on glacial lakes along with temporal variations in their sizes is required for assessing potential GLOF hazards and managing water resources. This research leverages Sentinel-1 Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) data in combination with Sentinel-2 optical imagery to create an updated inventory of glacial lakes in the Upper Indus Basin (UIB), Pakistan for the year 2023. The continuous Sentinel-1 timeseries processed via Google Earth Engine's cloud computing is used to understand the seasonal variability in glacial lake sizes. The study identified thousands of glacial lakes in the UIB, which cover a total area of around 100 km2. The study also found that the surface area of supraglacial and ice-dammed lakes shows a greater variation over time as compared to moraine-dammed lakes that have little seasonal variation in their size.

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