Adataset of glacier inventory on the northern slope of the Tianshan Mountains from 1990 to 2020

Glaciers are sensitive indicators of climate change, and studying their dynamics is of great significance in revealing global climate change. Influenced by global warming, glaciers on the Northern Tianshan Mountains are retreating rapidly. However, existing glacier inventories for the region primarily dates from around 2010, and the timeliness doesn’t meet the current research needs. This dataset is based on remote sensing images from the glacier ablation period of 1990 Landsat TM and 2020 Landsat OLI, Sentinel-2A/2B MSI. The glacier vector boundaries were determined using the band ratio method (Red/SWIR), combined with interactive manual methods and the Otsu algorithm to identify the optimal segmentation threshold. The binary images obtained from threshold segmentation were processed with median filtering and then converted into vector polygons using morphological opening and closing operations. The glacier vector boundaries were manually visually revised and data quality was verified using Google Earth and glacier cataloging information. This dataset includes data from both 2020 and 1990. The results show that the number and area of glaciers were 3,253 and 1,670.55 km2 in 2020, respectively, while the number and area of glaciers were 3,270 and 2,003.19 km2 in 1990. The errors in the glacier areas of the two periods due to the spatial resolution of the remote sensing images were 162.14 km2 (8.09%) for 1990 and 71.55 km2 (4.28%) for 2020. This dataset comprehensively reflects the status and changes of glacier resources the northern slope of the Tianshan Mountains between 1990 and 2020, providing fundamental data for research on water resource carrying capacity and water security in the region.