Fluctuations in Himalayan Glaciers 1

Application of SAR Interferometry for Himalayan Glaciers

With the help of ERS 1 and 2 tandem data, we have produced DEM and glacier movement of two major Himalayan glaciers in India. The glaciers showed good correlation but the surrounding areas had more decorrelation. Contours generated with ERS 1 and 2 SAR tandem data are comparable with topographic maps. We have used SRTM DEM to study the glacier movement involving two-pass differential method. Th...

The state and fate of Himalayan glaciers.

Himalayan glaciers are a focus of public and scientific debate. Prevailing uncertainties are of major concern because some projections of their future have serious implications for water resources. Most Himalayan glaciers are losing mass at rates similar to glaciers elsewhere, except for emerging indications of stability or mass gain in the Karakoram. A poor understanding of the processes affec...

Spatially heterogeneous wastage of Himalayan glaciers.

We describe volumetric changes in three benchmark glaciers in the Nepal Himalayas on which observations have been made since the 1970s. Compared with the global mean of glacier mass balance, the Himalayan glaciers showed rapid wastage in the 1970s-1990s, but similar wastage in the last decade. In the last decade, a glacier in an arid climate showed negative but suppressed mass balance compared ...

Flow and Fluctuations of Glaciers

Himalayan glaciers: the big picture is a montage.

U nusual miscarriages of science (1, 2) recently rocked climate change science and glaciology. An infamous paragraph, uncharacteristic of the rest of the contribution of Working Group II to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change Fourth Assessment, claimed that Himalayan glaciers would disappear by 2035 (1). In such a monumental report, errors can be expected. However, this error, explica...