Glacier elevation changes data in the High Mountain Asia derived from multi-temporal digital elevation models since the 1960s

DOI

Knowledge about the long-term response of High Mountain Asia (HMA) glaciers to climatic variations is paramount because of their important role in sustaining Asian river flow. Here. a satellite-based time series of glacier mass balance for seven climatically different regions across HMA since the 1960s were estimated by DEM differencing of multi-temporal optical data. The DEMs were corrected for planimetric and altimetric shifts using SRTM as a reference. Elevation dependent biases, present due to the tilt between two DEMs, were also estimated for each DEM using two-dimensional first order polynomial trend surfaces relative to the SRTM DEM. To remove outliers, we analyzed individual glacier elevation differences for each 100 m altitude bin. Considering the heterogeneity of the thickness change in glacierized terrain, outliers were removed by using an elevation dependent sigmoid function. Our study reveals a constant mass loss in all regions even in regions where glaciers were previously in balance with climate.

Identifier
DOI https://doi.org/10.1594/PANGAEA.933924
Related Identifier https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-021-24180-y
Metadata Access https://ws.pangaea.de/oai/provider?verb=GetRecord&metadataPrefix=datacite4&identifier=oai:pangaea.de:doi:10.1594/PANGAEA.933924
Provenance
Creator Bhattacharya, Atanu ORCID logo; Bolch, Tobias ORCID logo; Mukherjee, Kriti ORCID logo; King, Owen ORCID logo; Menounos, Brian ORCID logo; Kapitsa, Vassiliy (ORCID: 0000-0002-9342-160X); Neckel, Niklas ORCID logo; Yang, Wei; Yao, Tandong
Publisher PANGAEA
Publication Year 2021
Funding Reference Chinese Academy of Sciences https://doi.org/10.13039/501100002367 Crossref Funder ID XDA20100300 ; Swiss National Science Foundation https://doi.org/10.13039/501100001711 Crossref Funder ID 177652 https://data.snf.ch/grants/grant/177652 Estimation of global glacier mass changes
Rights Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International; https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
OpenAccess true
Representation
Resource Type Dataset
Format text/tab-separated-values
Size 16 data points
Discipline Earth System Research
Spatial Coverage (75.178W, 28.251S, 90.585E, 43.013N)