Methods for calculating glacier area and length in a mountainous area based on remote-sensing data and a digital elevation model

摘要

In a mountainous region, the glacier area and length extracted form the satellite imagery data is the projected area and length of the land surface, which can’t be representative of the reality; there are always some errors. In this paper, the methods of calculating glacier area and length calculation were put forward based on satellite imagery data and a digital elevation model (DEM). The pure pixels and the mixed pixels were extracted based on the linear spectral un-mixing approach, the slop of the pixels was calculated based on the DEM, then the area calculation method was presented. The projection length was obtained from the satellite imagery data, and the elevation differences was calculated from the DEM. The length calculation method was presented based on the Pythagorean theorem. For a glacier in the study area of western Qilian Mountain, northwestern China, the projected area and length were 140.93 km2 and 30.82 km, respectively. This compares with the results calculated by the methods in this paper, which were 155.16 km2 and 32.11 km respectively, a relative error of the projected area and length extracted from the LandSat Thematic Mapper (TM) image directly reach to -9.2 percent and -4.0 percent, respectively. The calculation method is more in accord with the practicality and can provide reference for some other object’s area and length monitoring in a mountainous region.