Changes of the tropical glaciers throughout Peru between 2000 and 2016 – mass balance and area fluctuations
Glaciers in tropical regions are very sensitive to climatic variations and thus strongly affected by climate change. The majority of the tropical glaciers worldwide are located in the Peruvian Andes, which have shown significant ice loss in the last century. Here, we present the first multi-temporal...
| Published in: | The Cryosphere |
|---|---|
| Main Authors: | , , , , , |
| Format: | Article in Journal/Newspaper |
| Language: | English |
| Published: |
Copernicus Publications
2019
|
| Subjects: | |
| Online Access: | https://doi.org/10.5194/tc-13-2537-2019 https://doaj.org/article/57ffe2aa35994022b8486da945e5b824 |
| Summary: | Glaciers in tropical regions are very sensitive to climatic variations and thus strongly affected by climate change. The majority of the tropical glaciers worldwide are located in the Peruvian Andes, which have shown significant ice loss in the last century. Here, we present the first multi-temporal, region-wide survey of geodetic mass balances and glacier area fluctuations throughout Peru covering the period 2000–2016. Glacier extents are derived from Landsat imagery by performing automatic glacier delineation based on a combination of the NDSI and band ratio method and final manual inspection and correction. The mapping of debris-covered glacier extents is supported by synthetic aperture radar (SAR) coherence information. A total glacier area loss of <math xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" id="M1" display="inline" overflow="scroll" dspmath="mathml"><mrow><mo>-</mo><mn mathvariant="normal">548.5</mn><mo>±</mo><mn mathvariant="normal">65.7</mn></mrow></math> <svg:svg xmlns:svg="http://www.w3.org/2000/svg" width="70pt" height="10pt" class="svg-formula" dspmath="mathimg" md5hash="4a56d867710ad1d0e6b59b40efc7543a"><svg:image xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink" xlink:href="tc-13-2537-2019-ie00001.svg" width="70pt" height="10pt" src="tc-13-2537-2019-ie00001.png"/></svg:svg> km 2 ( −29 %, −34.3 km 2 a −1 ) is obtained for the study period. Using interferometric satellite SAR acquisitions, bi-temporal geodetic mass balances are derived. An average specific mass balance of <math xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" id="M7" display="inline" overflow="scroll" dspmath="mathml"><mrow><mo>-</mo><mn mathvariant="normal">296</mn><mo>±</mo><mn mathvariant="normal">41</mn></mrow></math> <svg:svg xmlns:svg="http://www.w3.org/2000/svg" width="52pt" height="10pt" class="svg-formula" dspmath="mathimg" ... |
|---|