Announcement of Data Release Glacial Lake Inventory of Bhutan using ALOS (Daichi) Data

Link to Glacier study Resources Here

Manufacturing.Net - March 04, 2011



Announcement of Data Release Glacial Lake Inventory of Bhutan using ALOS (Daichi) Data

The Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) is cordially announcing public release of "Glacial Lake Inventory of Bhutan using the Advanced Land Observing Satellite (ALOS, nicknamed "Daichi") Data" (evaluation version). In the Himalayan region, there are numerous lakes in the vicinity of glaciers. These glacial lakes impose potential risks for sudden outbursts and consequent floods. This type of flooding event is referred to as a glacial lake outburst flood (GLOF), which occurs frequently enough in the Himalayan region. With a growing amount of public and scientific concern about hazards, climate change, and water management associated with GLOFs, the "Bhutan GLOF Project" (*1) aims at updating and improving glacial lake inventory for Bhutan using new and high spatial resolution data from ALOS. The motivation for this release is to support the research community and various domestic and international projects. By releasing the evaluation version, we hope to collect comments and suggestions for the preparation of the full release of the inventory, now scheduled in the spring of 2012.


The inventory is based on images taken between 2006 and 2011 from the two optical instruments, the Panchromatic Remote-sensing Instrument for Stereo Mapping (PRISM) and the Advanced Visible and Near Infrared Radiometer type 2 (AVNIR-2) onboard ALOS. The construction procedure consists of ortho-rectification, geometric correction, pan-sharpening, and digitization to extract water bodies. Glacial lakes included in the inventory are bodies of water that lay between the terminus of the mother glacier and the Little Ice Age moraine. Lakes located within 2 km of the Little Ice Age moraine down-valley are also included to take into account a possible flooding event with multiple lakes being involved. In addition, supraglacial lakes on debris-covered glaciers are included. Finally, we set 0.01 km2 as the minimum lake size considering small lakes contribute a less amount of GLOFs' risk. For this release we selected the Mangde Chu sub-basin, located in the central Bhutan. The parameters included in the inventory are ID, latitude, longitude, area, length, width, and some references in addition to a shape file for each lake. There are 93 glacial lakes in the Mangde Chu sub-basin.

Figure 1 shows the pan-sharpended image covering Bhutan overlaid the glacial lakes inventory (yellow polygons), Mangde Chu sub-basin (red line) and the Bhutanese border (gray line). Figure 2 provides the detailed image over Metathota glacial lake (yellow polygons) with ground truth data by GPS measurements in 2010 (green line). The red polygons indicate existing inventory provided in 2000.

*1 The project is a collaborative work of Nagoya University, Rikkyo University, Hokkaido University, National Research Institute for Earth Science and Disaster Prevention (NIED), Hiroshima Institute of Technology, Japan Agency for Marine-Earth Science and Technology (JAMSTEC), Remote Sensing Technology Center of Japan (RESTEC), Niigata University, Research Institute for Humanity and Nature (RIHN), Earth System Science Co.,Ltd. (ESS), Hirosaki University, Nihon University, Teikyo Heisei University, Gunma University, Keio University and the Department of Mineral and Geology (DGM) of the Royal Government of Bhutan supported by the Japan Science and Technology Agency (JST) and the Japan International Cooperation Agency (JICA) under the "Science and Technology Research Partnership for Sustainable Development" (SATREPS).

Link to the Inventory
http://www.eorc.jaxa.jp/ALOS/en/bhutan_gli/index.htm (in English)
http://www.eorc.jaxa.jp/ALOS/bhutan_gli/index.htm (in Japanese)

Himalayan glaciers' melting poses threat to not only Bhutan, but entire South Asia

Turkmenistan News.Net
Friday 23rd October, 2009 (ANI)
London, October 23 : Reports indicate that the melting of the Himalayan glaciers is threatening the kingdom of Bhutan, the impacts of which will adversely affect the entire South Asian region.

According to a report in Nature News, glaciers in the Himalayas are retreating faster than in any other part of the world and they could disappear completely by 2035.

This puts the mountainous nation of Bhutan at a special risk.

In an area smaller than Switzerland, it has 983 glaciers and 2,794 glacial lakes, some of which have burst to produce deadly glacial lake floods.

As a poor nation without even its own helicopter, Bhutan lacks the resources to combat global warming.

It is carrying out the work at Thorthormi glacier with the help of money from various international donors.

As the first nation to get adaptation money from the Least Developed Countries Fund, Bhutan is something of a pioneer among developing nations in their quest to adapt to a warmer future, and the struggles at Thorthormi glacier illustrate the enormous obstacles that adaptation efforts still face.

It is only within the past decade that researchers realized that Thorthormi could pose a threat.

Thorthormi's ponds were expanding and merging to form larger bodies of water. The changes have been dramatic even in the past few months.

"Just before we started our work here in July this year, that part of the lake was water," said Karma Toeb, the project's glaciologist and team leader, pointing down to a number of icebergs. "The ice blocks have been breaking off the mother glacier upstream," he added.

According to Thinley Namgyel, the deputy chief environment officer at the National Environment Commission in Thimphu, "A few decades down the line, the glaciers will retreat and we are not sure what impact it will have on the economy."

But, the impacts of the melting of the Himalayan glaciers will reach far beyond Bhutan's borders.

The glacier-fed rivers that flow south from the Himalayas are the arteries of south Asia.

It is estimated that the retreat of glaciers will affect the water supply of roughly 750 million people across South Asia and China, according to Rajendra Pachauri, the chairman of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).

Across Asia, there are countless cases like Thorthormi, where the needs are great and the resources scarce.

Regarding the effects of climate change and their costs, "every single estimate that people have come up with has been exceeded by reality", said Pachauri.

"The impacts of climate change are clearly turning out to be much worse than what we had anticipated earlier," he added.