Innovators II - GLOF

To help build up local capacity and measures different organizations are active. ICIMOD, the International Centre for Integrated Mountain Development, supported by UNEP and the Swiss Agency for Development and Cooperation (SDC) among others, is very active in the Himalayan Mountains. According to measurements taken by ICIMOD, temperature build-up in the Hindu Kush Himalayas exceeds the global average. The risk of devastating Glacial Lake Outburst Floods (GLOFs) has therefore increased substantially: While potentially calamitous outburst floods used to occur in the region every 200 to 300 years, ICIMOD reports that they now occur every 2-3 years. FOCUS is very active in Tajikistan in the Pamir Mountains supporting the local and national authorities to build awareness and capacity.

Within this proposed project we want to provide these organizations a service that addresses their need for information on glacial lakes, glacial lake extent and glacial lake extent change, with respect to GLOF. We propose to setup and demonstrate a service that allows to map and monitor glacial lakes based on very high resolution SAR data. The resulting information will be in a form that it can be easy integrated in the end-users GIS systems and used within the available infrastructure.