Investigation on Khersan Glacier in Zardkuh, Using Satellite Images

Considering glaciers as a main source of potable water in Iran, their investigations and protection are necessary. It means their parameters such as maximum and minimum altitude, area and perimeter, position of snow line and etc, should be estimated. In a time and expenses point of view, regarding research difficulties in these areas when using direct measurements approach and field working, remote sensing technology seems to be useful and efficient. IRS and ASTER satellite images, Arial photographs and DEM, have been used to identify and estimate different glacier parameters of Khersan glacier in the Zardkuh Mountain. Using various unsupervised classification algorithms on Aster images, different parts of glaciers are classified. Feature space and spectral wave of snow and ice have been used to recognize various parts of glacier, such as ice, last years frozen snow as well as frost snow. Ultimately DEM, fused images, information extracted from classification methods, and vision interpretation, have been applied to up to date the old map of the region and extract the boundary of glacier.