High resolution inventory and hazard assessment of potentially dangerous glacial lakes in upper Jhelum basin, Kashmir Himalaya, India

Abstract

In the Himalayan Mountain region, a large number of glacial lakes have developed in the recent past due to glacier recession under the influence of climate change. In this study, we used high resolution satellite data such as Indian Remote Sensing (IRS) LISS-IV (5.8 m) and Google earth images supplemented with field survey to generate an updated glacial lake inventory of Upper Jhelum Basin (UJB) of Kashmir Himalaya. The Sentinel-2A (10 m), Landsat-OLI (30 m) and MSS (60 m), and Cartosat-DEM (30 m) were additional data sources used for glacial lake mapping and change detection analysis. A total of 393 glacial lakes covering an area of 21.55 ± 3.8 km² were identified, mapped and inventoried. The lake inventory includes 102 proglacial lakes, 13 supraglacial lakes and 278 unconnected glacial lakes. Using the weighted index-based method, 21 glacial lakes were found as Potentially Dangerous Glacial Lakes (PDGLs). Out of these, 7 lakes were classified as High, 9 as Medium and 5 as Low hazard glacial lakes as per the hazard assessment. Change detection analysis of PDGLs from 1980 to 2020 revealed an increase in area from 5.92 km² to 8.46 km² thereby, indicating a growth of 2.51 ±0.9 km²(30%) at a rate of 0.063 km²/year. The formation and growth of glacial lakes in this area is attributed to continuous glacier recession under the warming trend of temperature and declining nature of precipitation. In this study, the findings showed that T_avg and T_min are rising significantly at a rate of 0.004ºC/year and 0.013ºC/year respectively. This study provides an important database for future GLOF studies in the region.

Keywords:

• Climate change
• Glacial Lake Inventory
• LISS-IV
• PDGLs
• Upper Jhelum basin
• Kashmir Himalaya

Acknowledgements

The authors are thankful to the United States Geological Survey (USGS) for freely providing the satellite data used in this study. The first author acknowledges the support of University Grants Commission (UGC) in the form of grants made available under MANF-JRF scheme for pursuing Ph.D. The corresponding author acknowledges the support of MOES and NCPOR under HiCom Initititaive.

Disclosure statement

The authors have no conflicts of interest to declare that are relevant to the content of this article.

Data availability

The inventory data is freely available at https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.4458185(Ahmed et al. 2021).