Change Monitoring of Gangotri Glacier using Remote Sensing
M Anul Haq1, Kamal Jain2, KPR Menon3
1M Anul Haq, Department of Civil Engg(Geomatics Section)., Indian Institute of Technology, Roorkee, India.
2Dr Kamal Jain, Dept. Civil Engg(Geomatics Section)., Indian Institute of Technology, Roorkee, India.
3Dr K.P.R. Menon, NRSC, Balanager, Hyderabad, India.
Manuscript received on December 07, 2011. | Revised Manuscript received on December 23, 2011. | Manuscript published on January 05, 2012. | PP: 259-261 | Volume-1 Issue-6, January 2012. | Retrieval Number: F0314111611/2012©BEIESP
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© The Authors. Published By: Blue Eyes Intelligence Engineering and Sciences Publication (BEIESP). This is an open access article under the CC BY-NC-ND license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/)
Abstract: Himalayas has one of the largest resources of snow and ice, which act as a freshwater reservoir for all the rivers originating from it. Monitoring of these resources is important for the assessment of availability of water in the Himalayan Rivers. The mapping of Glaciers is very difficult task because of the inaccessibility and remoteness of the terrain. Remote sensing techniques are often the only way to analyze glaciers in remote mountains and to monitor a large number of glaciers in multitemporal manner. This paper presents the results obtained from the analysis of a set of multitemporal Landsat MSS, TM and ETM+ images for the monitoring and analysis of Gangotri Glacier main trunk change. The investigation has shown an overall reduction in glacier area from 63.227 sq km to 62.412 sq km between 1972 and 2010, an overall deglaciation of 1.3% percent. To monitor seasonal snow cover, NDSI based algorithm was used to monitor the Gangotri glacier main trunk.
Keywords: Ablation, Digital Elevation Model, Glacier, NDSI, Snow.