Quantifying degradation of the Imja Lake moraine dam with fused InSAR and SAR feature tracking time series

Brencher, George; Henderson, Scott T.; Shean, David E.

doi:10.5194/tc-20-67-2026

Articles | Volume 20, issue 1

https://doi.org/10.5194/tc-20-67-2026

© Author(s) 2026. This work is distributed under
the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License.

https://doi.org/10.5194/tc-20-67-2026

© Author(s) 2026. This work is distributed under
the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License.

Articles | Volume 20, issue 1

Research article

|

07 Jan 2026

Research article |

| 07 Jan 2026

Quantifying degradation of the Imja Lake moraine dam with fused InSAR and SAR feature tracking time series

George Brencher, Scott T. Henderson, and David E. Shean

Supplement

https://doi.org/10.5194/tc-20-67-2026-supplement

Data sets

fufiters_imja_analysis dataset: Release for accepted article George Brencher et al. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.17762405

Model code and software

relativeorbit/fufiters: v1.0 Scott Henderson and George Brencher https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.17466768

gbrencher/fufiters_imja_analysis: v0.1.0 (v0.1.0) Q. Brencher https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.17751810

Short summary

Glacial lakes are often dammed by moraines, which can fail, causing floods. Traditional methods of measuring moraine dam structure are not feasible for thousands of lakes. We instead developed a method to measure moraine dam movement with satellite radar data and applied this approach to the Imja Lake moraine dam in Nepal. We found that the moraine dam moved ~90 cm from 2017–2024, providing information about its internal structure. These data can help guide limited hazard remediation resources.