The second Chinese glacier inventory: data, methods and results

The second Chinese glacier inventory was compiled based on 218 Landsat TM/ETM+ scenes acquired mainly during 2006-10. The widely used band ratio segmentation method was applied as the first step in delineating glacier outlines, and then intensive manual improvements were performed. The Shuttle Radar...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Journal of Glaciology
Main Authors: Guo, Wanqin, Liu, Shiyin, Xu, Li, Wu, Lizong, Shangguan, Donghui, Yao, Xiaojun, Wei, Junfeng, Bao, Weijia, Yu, Pengchun, Liu, Qiao, Jiang, Zongli
Format: Article in Journal/Newspaper
Language:English
Published: 2015
Subjects:
Debris-covered Glaciers
Glacier Delineation
Glacier Mapping
Mountain Glaciers
Remote Sensing
Science & Technology
Physical Sciences
Physical Geography
Geology
LAND ICE MEASUREMENTS
REMOTE-SENSING DATA
SEA-LEVEL RISE
TIBETAN PLATEAU
PATAGONIA ICEFIELD
CORDILLERA BLANCA
SOUTH-AMERICA
GLIMS PROJECT
ASTER DATA
TM SCENES
Geography
Physical
Geosciences
Multidisciplinary
Patagonia
Journal of Glaciology
Online Access:http://ir.imde.ac.cn/handle/131551/10490
https://doi.org/10.3189/2015JoG14J209
Description
Summary:The second Chinese glacier inventory was compiled based on 218 Landsat TM/ETM+ scenes acquired mainly during 2006-10. The widely used band ratio segmentation method was applied as the first step in delineating glacier outlines, and then intensive manual improvements were performed. The Shuttle Radar Topography Mission digital elevation model was used to derive altitudinal attributes of glaciers. The boundaries of some glaciers measured by real-time kinematic differential GPS or digitized from high-resolution images were used as references to validate the accuracy of the methods used to delineate glaciers, which resulted in positioning errors of +/- 10 m for manually improved clean-ice outlines and +/- 30 m for manually digitized outlines of debris-covered parts. The glacier area error of the compiled inventory, evaluated using these two positioning accuracies, was +/- 3.2%. The compiled parts of the new inventory have a total area of 43 087 km(2), in which 1723 glaciers were covered by debris, with a total debris-covered area of 1494 km(2). The area of uncompiled glaciers from the digitized first Chinese glacier inventory is similar to 8753 km(2), mainly distributed in the southeastern Tibetan Plateau, where no images of acceptable quality for glacier outline delineation can be found during 2006-10.

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