Three decadal monitoring of mountain glaciers in Ecuador -A case study on ENSO impact on Andean glaciers: A Remote sensing perspective

This paper describes the application of remote sensing in monitoring mountain glaciers in the Ecuadorean Andes during the past three decades using EO-1 ALI, Landsat MSS, TM and ETM+ images. An attempt to correlate the El Nino -Southern Oscillation (ENSO) phenomenon with the glacier fluctuations in Ecuadorian Andes is done in this research. Precipitation data from various gauging stations in capital Quito, Napo and surrounding areas were utilized in this study and tried to correlate the precipitation data with ENSO variables. A lag of 1 to 3 months in zonal mean tropical anomalies relative to equatorial east pacific SSTs is proven from the mass balance changes. The changes in these mountain ice caps were believed to have some connections with the global warming scenarios and local factors such as volcanic activity and surface air temperature values. Different ice caps in the two different cordilleras showed different response rates in mass balance changes. One of the greatest advantage of using remote sensing data in multitemporal glacier monitoring is the fact that a large number of glaciers can be studied within a limited time period with minimum cost.