The Cordillera Blanca, located in the central zone of the Andes Mountains in Peru, has shown a retreat in its glaciers. This paper presents a trend analysis of the glacier area over the groups of Nevados Caullaraju-Pastoruri from 1975 to 2010 using Landsat-5 Thematic Mapper (TM) imagery. In the case of the Nevados Pastoruri/Tuco, the study period was extended back to 1957 by using an aerial photograph taken that year. The extent of clean glacier ice was estimated using Normalized Difference Snow Index (NDSI) thresholds. Moreover, the estimation of debris-covered glacier ice was retrieved by means of a decision tree classification method using NDSI, Normalized Difference Vegetation Index (NDVI) and Land Surface Temperature (LST). Area estimations derived from Landsat imagery were compared to the glacier ground-truth data in 1975 and 2010. Results show a statistically significant (p < 0.05...

The Cordillera Blanca, located in the central zone of the Andes Mountains in Peru, has shown a retreat in its glaciers. This paper presents a trend analysis of the glacier area over the groups of Nevados Caullaraju-Pastoruri from 1975 to 2010 using Landsat-5 Thematic Mapper (TM) imagery. In the case of the Nevados Pastoruri/Tuco, the study period was extended back to 1957 by using an aerial photograph taken that year. The extent of clean glacier ice was estimated using Normalized Difference Snow Index (NDSI) thresholds. Moreover, the estimation of debris-covered glacier ice was retrieved by means of a decision tree classification method using NDSI, Normalized Difference Vegetation Index (NDVI) and Land Surface Temperature (LST). Area estimations derived from Landsat imagery were compared to the glacier ground-truth data in 1975 and 2010. Results show a statistically significant (p < 0.05...