Monitoring Glacier Elevation Change in Central Asia Using TanDEM-X DEMs

Mountain glaciers are sentinels of climate change and play a critical role in water security across Central Asia’s semi-arid landscapes, underpinning irrigation, drinking water, and hydropower. Recent warming, shifting precipitation, and accelerated glacier retreat threaten these cryospheric reserves, creating cascading implications for downstream hazards and water-resource reliability. We quantify high-resolution glacier elevation change using multi-source digital elevation model (DEM) differencing, with a particular focus on TanDEM-X products. Multi-temporal DEMs were rigorously co-registered and differenced, and then intersected with glacier inventories to isolate ice-covered terrain. A distribution-based filter was applied to suppress extreme outliers and minimize noise, improving the fidelity of elevation-change estimates over complex mountain topography. The results reveal widespread glacier thinning across Central Asia, while adjacent non-glacierised terrain shows minimal elevation change. This supports the robustness of the workflow. The spatial patterns are heterogeneous, identifying hotspots of accelerated mass loss and zones of relative persistence that likely reflect contrasts in aspect, elevation, debris cover, and local climate forcing. These findings provide actionable evidence for water-resource planning and climate adaptation, including prioritisation of basins at risk from diminished dry-season flows and glacier-related hazards. More broadly, the study demonstrates the utility of TanDEM-X–based DEM differencing for operational glacier monitoring in data-limited mountain regions and establishes a framework that can be extended with mass-balance conversion, uncertainty budgeting, and coupling to hydrological models.