A dataset of glacial lakes in Nepal in 2023

A glacial lake refers to a natural body of water mainly supplied by modern glacial meltwater or formed in glacier moraine’s depression. It serves as both a valuable natural resource and a breeding ground and source of mountainous disasters. Nepal is located on the southern slope of the central Himalayas, where numerous glacial lakes are distributed. Frequent glacial lake outburst floods (GLOFs) from these lakes pose a threat to the safety of downstream areas. Therefore, a high-quality, timely glacial lake dataset is fundamental to studying glacial lake hazards in this region. In this study, Sentinel-2 MSI remote sensing imagery and the Attention DeepLab V3+ semantic segmentation model were employed to perform automated extraction of glacial lakes within Nepal in 2023. Then, we compiled 17 attributes across four categories: regional information, data source information, mother glacier information, and glacial lake information for glacial lakes. This ultimately yielded the 2023 Nepal glacial lake dataset. The results show that there were a total of 2,578 glacial lakes in Nepal in 2023, covering a combined area of 89.35 km². The area error was 7.91 km² (8.85%). This dataset accurately reflects the spatial distribution characteristics of glacial lakes in Nepal in 2023. Stored in .shp format, it provides foundational data for glacial lake hazard early warning and assessment in Nepal.