Changes in glacial lakes in the Poiqu River basin in the central Himalayas

Abstract

The Poiqu River basin is an area of concentration for glaciers and glacial lakes in the central Himalayas, where 147 glacial lakes were identified, based on perennial remote sensing images, with lake area ranging from 0.0002 to 5.5 km2 – a total of 19.89 km2. Since 2004, the retreat rate of glacier has reached as high as 5.0 km2 a−1, while the growth rate of glacial lake has reached 0.24 km2 a−1. We take five typical lakes as our case study and find that the retreat of glacier area reaches 31.2 %, while the glacial lake area has expanded by 166 %. Moreover, we reconstruct the topography of the lake basin to calculate the water capacity and propose a water balance equation (WBE) to explore the lake evolution. By applying the WBE to the five lakes, we calculate the water supplies of the last few years and compare this with the results of field surveys, which are in agreement, within an error of only 1.86 % on average. The WBE also reveals that the water supplies to the lake depend strongly on the altitude. Lakes at low altitudes are supplied by glacier melting, and lakes at high altitudes are supplied by snowmelts. The WBE is not only applicable for predicting future changes in glacial lakes under climate warming conditions but is also useful for assessing water resources from rivers in the central Himalayas.