Measurement of changes in glacier extent in the Rimo glacier, a sub-range of the Karakoram Range, determined from Landsat imagery

Accurate estimation of the spatiotemporal surface dynamics is very important for natural resource planning. This paper discusses a novel approach for the study of the surface patterns of a particular glacier Rimo located at 35°21′21″N77°22′05″E, about 20 km northeast of the snout of Siachen. Change detection in multiple images of the same location taken at different time intervals are of widely circulated use due to a large number of applications in various disciplines such as climate change, remote sensing and so on. The proposed technique uses image processing to derive regression models of selected glacier segments, these models are then used to measure area under the curve to estimate the surface area changes of the glacier. The surface area changes thus obtained have also been validated by standard method of pixel counting. With the rise in the global warming, the net change in the surface area of the concerned glacier is estimated using statistical analysis from 1998 to 2011. The results obtained show a fair degree of accuracy as compared to the standard method of pixel counting. We also discuss important pre-processing methods used in extracting the final concerned region of interest from a large satellite imagery of fairly average resolution.