Towards a glacier velocity field at the scale of the Himalayas

International audienceHimalayan glaciers are under pressure due to climate change but spatial and temporal characteristics of glaciers change are not very well constrained. The fate of Himalayan glaciers is particularly important for local populations and for understanding the various patterns of climate change in the region. Thus it is important to quantify their evolution over the last decades to be able to understand future dynamic. Recent studies focus only on restricted areas, over a short time­scale whereas the diversity of the himalayan glaciers requires to work on a global scale and a time scale that is larger than the climatic variability. Glaciers' velocity is an important variable to characterise glaciers' evolution and dynamics. The Landsat archive with its global coverage and 40 years of temporal coverage is a major EO dataset for improving the spatial and temporal resolution of Himalayan glaciers' change. Here we present the premice of a fully automated processing chain used to derive glacier velocity for the entire himalayan range for the period 1972-2013