Glacial lake inventory and lake outburst potential in Uzbekistan

Details

Serval ID
serval:BIB_0A09A58CEEBC
Type
Article: article from journal or magazin.
Collection
Publications
Title
Glacial lake inventory and lake outburst potential in Uzbekistan
Journal
Science of The Total Environment
Author(s)
Petrov Maxim A., Sabitov Timur Y., Tomashevskaya Irina G., Glazirin Gleb E., Chernomorets Sergey S., Savernyuk Elena A., Tutubalina Olga V., Petrakov Dmitriy A., Sokolov Leonid S., Dokukin Mikhail D., Mountrakis Giorgos, Ruiz-Villanueva Virginia, Stoffel Markus
ISSN
0048-9697
Publication state
Published
Issued date
08/2017
Peer-reviewed
Oui
Volume
592
Pages
228-242
Language
english
Abstract
Climate change has been shown to increase the number of mountain lakes across various mountain ranges in the World. In Central Asia, and in particular on the territory of Uzbekistan, a detailed assessment of glacier lakes and their evolution over time is, however lacking. For this reason we created the first detailed inventory of mountain lakes of Uzbekistan based on recent (2002–2014) satellite observations using WorldView-2, SPOT5, and IKONOS imagery with a spatial resolution from 2 to 10 m. This record was complemented with data from field studies of the last 50 years. The previous data were mostly in the form of inventories of lakes, available in Soviet archives, and primarily included localized in-situ data. The inventory of mountain lakes presented here, by contrast, includes an overview of all lakes of the territory of Uzbekistan. Lakes were considered if they were located at altitudes above 1500 m and if lakes had an area exceeding 100 m2. As in other mountain regions of the World, the ongoing increase of air temperatures has led to an increase in lake number and area. Moreover, the frequency and overall number of lake outburst events have been on the rise as well. Therefore, we also present the first outburst assessment with an updated version of well-known approaches considering local climate features and event histories. As a result, out of the 242 lakes identified on the territory of Uzbekistan, 15% are considered prone to outburst, 10% of these lakes have been assigned low outburst potential and the remainder of the lakes have an average level of outburst potential. We conclude that the distribution of lakes by elevation shows a significant influence on lake area and hazard potential. No significant differences, by contrast, exist between the distribution of lake area, outburst potential, and lake location with respect to glaciers by regions.
Keywords
Glacial lake outburst floods (GLOF), Uzbekistan, Mountain lakes, Glacier shrinkage, Outburst assessment, Lakes inventory, Debris flow, Remote sensing, GIS
Pubmed
Web of science
Open Access
Yes
Funding(s)
Swiss National Science Foundation / 152301
Create date
17/10/2020 12:03
Last modification date
13/12/2022 10:03
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