Temporal and spatial change of snow line altitude in Qiyi glacier, Qilian Mountain

In this paper, we utilize Landsat TM and ETM data retrieval the albedo of the Qiyi glacier in Qilian Mountains, and classify the glacier into 4 types based on the statistics on in the GIS software, then combined with DEM extracted contour lines to determine the altitude of the snow line. We use this method to obtain the snow line of the Qiyi glacier in the year of 1999, 2002, 2003, 2006, 2009, by the data source restrictions, the value of the snow line altitude is not continuous in the time series, but fit well with the measured ELA and computed ELA, on the basis of this result we analyse the temporal and spatial changes of the snow line.