A review of volume-area scaling method for glacier volume estimation

Climate change plays key role in fluctuations for glacier mass and volume which affects the melt discharge in mountainous region. Glaciers are important frozen water reserve making it crucial to observe this natural resource. Remote sensing plays a significant role in inventorying and monitoring glaciers from space, however stored frozen water volume is still a critical domain with minimizing the uncertainties in its estimation. In this paper, a brief description of different approaches and their evolution based on Volume-Area scaling method for glacier volume estimation has been discussed. The Volume-Area scaling method has potential to estimate volume with minimal input dataset and has been used to assess and validate retrieved glacier volume based on other parallel methods such as ice-thickness distribution and other advance techniques (ANN, optimization). Minimal input requirement makes this approach easily adoptable to assess frozen water volume and has been widely used to evaluate storage capacity of glaciers in mountainous region at regional and global level. Volume-scale area method implementation has also been elaborated in the perspective of Himalayan region along with its role to assess change in water volume in changing climate scenarios.