Evaluation of the Global Glacier Inventories and Assessment of Glacier Thickness Changes over North-western Himalaya

Abstract. The study evaluates the global glacier inventories available for the study area viz., RGI, GAMDAM and ICIMOD, with the newly generated Kashmir University Glacier Inventory (KUGI) for three Himalaya basins; Jhelum, Suru and Chenab in the north-western Himalaya, comprising of 2096 glaciers spread over an area of 3300 km2. The KUGI was prepared from the Landsat data supplemented by Digital Elevation Model, Google Earth images and limited field surveys. The KUGI comprises of 154 glaciers in the Jhelum, 328 in the Suru and 1614 in the Chenab basin, corresponding to the glacier area of 85.9 ± 11.4 km2, 487 ± 16.2 km2 and 2727 ± 90.2 km2 respectively. The investigation revealed that most of the glaciers in the study area are http://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.4461799 (Romshoo et al., 2021).