Monitoring thickness changes of mountain glacier by differential interferometry of ALOS PALSAR DATA

The glacier volume changes on Qinghai-Tibetan Plateau are believed to currently provide significant responses to global climate change and strongly influence human welfare in this arid or semi-arid region, where water supplies are predominantly from glacier melt. So the elevation changes of the mountain glaciers play an important role in compute the volume change. Previous researches mainly used two temporal digital elevation models (DEM) to monitor the glacier elevation changes. However, these methods may introduce more errors caused by the DEMs. This paper presents a novel method to monitor the thickness changes of mountain glacier based on the deformation extracted by D-InSAR of the glacier´s surface. Using this method, we can monitor the thickness changes in cm-level accuracy. In order to demonstrate this method a practical example, the monitoring thickness changes of the Kangwure Glacier in the middle part of the Himalayas of China, is given.