The Spatio-Temporal Patterns of Glacier Activities in the Eastern Pamir Plateau Investigated by Time Series Sub-Pixel Offsets From Sentinel-2 Optical Images

The eastern Pamir Plateau, with a mean altitude of 5000 m, forms a large-scale glacier region with a size of 2054 km<sup>2</sup> that serves as an important environmental climate condition for central Asia. In this article, we estimated the spatio-temporal patterns of glacier activities...

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Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Jue Zhang, Ping He, Xiaoping Hu, Zhumei Liu
Format: Article
Language:English
Published: IEEE 2023-01-01
Series:IEEE Journal of Selected Topics in Applied Earth Observations and Remote Sensing
Subjects:
Online Access:https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/10013723/
Description
Summary:The eastern Pamir Plateau, with a mean altitude of 5000 m, forms a large-scale glacier region with a size of 2054 km<sup>2</sup> that serves as an important environmental climate condition for central Asia. In this article, we estimated the spatio-temporal patterns of glacier activities in this region by using the time series sub-pixel offsets derived from 63 sentinel-2 optical images between December 31, 2020 and December 31, 2021. Our results indicated the mean glacier flow velocity in this region was 0.531 m&#x002F;d &#x00B1; 0.007 m&#x002F;d in 2021, and the Kongur Tagh Glacier was much more active than the Kingata Glacier and Muztagh Ata Glacier. The time series observations revealed that the glacier motion involves a pre-melting period (January&#x2013;April) with a velocity of 0.600 m&#x002F;d &#x00B1; 0.012 m&#x002F;d, a melting period (May&#x2013;August) with a velocity of 0.608 m&#x002F;d &#x00B1; 0.003 m&#x002F;d, and a post-melting period (September&#x2013;December) with a velocity of 0.659 m&#x002F;d &#x00B1; 0.006 m&#x002F;d. In order to get insights into the characteristics of these glacier activities, we carried out a correlation analysis between the glacier flow velocity change and its potential caused reasons (i.e., topography, temperature, precipitation, glacier surges, debris-cover, and glacier thickness), and current results suggest that the glacier flow velocity is influenced by a combination of these factors.
ISSN:2151-1535