Arid Zone Research ›› 2024, Vol. 41 ›› Issue (6): 940-950.doi: 10.13866/j.azr.2024.06.04

• Land and Water Resources • Previous Articles     Next Articles

Monitoring the glacier changes in Yilian Habirga Mountain using Sentinel-2 data

LI Ruonan1,2,3(), LI Junli1,3(), LI Shuangshuang1,4, LIU Shuaiqi1,2,3, DU Weibin4   

  1. 1. State Key Laboratory of Desert and Oasis Ecology, Xinjiang Institute of Ecology and Geography, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Urumqi 830011, Xinjiang, China
    2. University of Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing 100049, China
    3. Key Laboratory of GIS & RS Application Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region, Urumqi 830011, Xinjiang, China
    4. College of Survey and Territory Information Engineering, Henan Polytechnic University, Jiaozuo 454003, Henan, China
  • Received:2023-10-23 Revised:2024-01-30 Online:2024-06-15 Published:2024-07-03

Abstract:

High-resolution time-series remote sensing plays a vital role in monitoring glacier changes. In this paper, Sentinel-2 multitemporal satellite images from 2016-2022 were used along with the D-UNet semantic segmentation model to extract the glacier change information of Yilian Habirga. These results were compared with the Landsat remote sensing data of the similar temporal phase to ascertain any differences in the accuracies of Sentinel-2 and Landsat for glacier mapping. Based on these findings, 75 typical glaciers were selected to analyze the change-related characteristics of the total glacier area and glacier end in the recent study area. The results show that (1) The overall accuracy of Sentinel-2 glacier mapping was 95.0%, which is 5%-10% higher than Landsat-8 under the same conditions. (2) The average area retreat rate of glaciers in the study area from 2016 to 2022 was 0.75%±0.69%·a-1, in which the region<4600 m above sea level was that of glacier area reduction; the lower the altitude, the greater the area retreat rate. (3) In the last 6 years, the average heights of the 75 typical glacier ends rose by 17.75 m, and the average lengths reduced by 11.39 ± 2.36 m·a-1. Among these, the retreats in the west, northeast, and south were the most significant, which were 15.49 ± 2.36 m·a-1, 13.95 ± 2.36 m·a-1, and 13.14 ± 2.36 m·a-1, respectively; the rate of the glacier end retreated with an increase in the elevation and the decreased.

Key words: glacier terminus, deep learning, spatiotemporal variation, Sentinle-2, Yilian Habirga Mountain