Inventory of Glacial Lakes in High Mountain Asia for the Periods 2016-2017 and 2022-2024

We have developed an updated and comprehensive inventory of glacial lakes across High Mountain Asia (HMA) for the year 2022, identifying a total of 31,698 glacial lakes. This inventory was created by integrating multi-source remote sensing datasets, including Landsat-8, Sentinel-1, Sentinel-2, and the Copernicus DEM. We achieved a high detection accuracy of 96% for smaller glacial lakes (20,000–100,000 m²) and successfully detected all larger glacial lakes with high delineation accuracy. Additionally, we generated median lake boundaries for two observation periods (2016-17 and 2022-24) by using median composites of all available imagery for each period to minimize the influence of seasonal variations in lake extents. This database can serve as a valuable resource for monitoring GLOFs, downstream risk assessment, and water resource management in the region.