Detection and mapping of snow avalanche debris from Western Himalaya, India using remote sensing satellite images

Abstract

Release of snow avalanche from a mountain slope depends on various parameters such as snow cover, terrain and meteorological conditions of the region. The precise information of avalanche occurrence in terms of its location and extent is essentially important for hazard mapping and for avalanche occurrence feedback. In the present study, various techniques have been explored for automatic detection and mapping of snow avalanche debris for a part of Western Himalayan region using Sentinel-2 satellite data. Spectral signatures of avalanche and non-avalanche snow collected from the field spectroradiometer survey are used for identifying suitable spectral bands of Sentinel-2 for avalanche debris detection. Techniques such as Ratio Method, Gray Level Co-occurrence Matrix, a new proposed index, i.e. Avalanche Debris Index and Object-Based Image Analysis (OBIA) are applied on satellite images to retrieve the avalanche debris. Retrieved avalanche debris are further compared with the manually digitized avalanche occurred boundaries. The OBIA method has been found the most suitable for avalanche debris detection and mapping using the medium resolution satellite data.

Keywords:

• Avalanche occurrence feedback
• OBIA
• Western Himalaya
• GLCM
• spectroradiometer

Acknowledgements

The authors are grateful to Director, Snow and Avalanche Study Establishment (SASE), Chandigarh for his support to this work. The authors would like to acknowledge SASE technical persons for collecting ground data and Manish Kala for manuscript editing. We are thankful to Copernicus Open Access Hub of the European Union Copernicus Programme for providing the freely downloadable Sentinel-2 data.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).