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Abstract

Climate change and associated glacier recession have led to the formation of new glacial lakes and the expansion of existing lakes across the Himalayas. Such lakes pose a potential glacial lake outburst floods (GLOFs) threat to downstream communities and infrastructure. The accelerated growth of glacial lakes has resulted in increased hazard and damage potential of GLOFs in Kinnaur district, Himachal Pradesh. To understand the spatiotemporal dynamism, a temporal inventory of glacial lakes in the study area for the years 2000, 2010, and 2022 is prepared at 30m resolution using Landsat satellite imagery. The study performed a three-step semi-automatic method for mapping glacial lakes based on geospatial techniques that included the use of the normalized difference water index (NDWI), elimination of mountain shadows using the Cartosat digital elevation model (DEM), and manual vectorization of lakes using Google Earth imagery. A total of 147 glacial lakes were identified having an area > 0.25 ha for the year 2022. This study presents an important database of glacial lakes and provides a basis for long-term monitoring and evaluation of outburst flood disasters primarily caused by glacial lakes in the study area.