The inventory of glacial lakes and results of risk assessment in the Third Pole

We focused on glacial lakes with areas ≥ 0.02 km² that were primarily fed by contemporary glacier meltwater within a 10 km glacier buffer. Numerous thermokarst lakes and lakes without parent glaciers were excluded. Three time windows, 2018, 2020, and 2022, were selected to create new inventories and were combined with other available datasets to reveal the short-term and long-term glacial lake changes. A total of 878 Sentinel-2A/B images (10-m resolution) were used to manually delineate the glacial lakes. To ensure a sufficient storage period for the glacial lakes during the year and to minimize the presence of mountain shadows, priority was given to images captured between July and November with less than 10% cloud coverage. The images were processed using a false-color composition of bands 4, 3, and 2 to highlight the water bodies. Throughout the workflow, each glacial lake underwent thorough review at least six times, ensuring the inventory's completeness according to our standards.