Two monitoring stations started operation in Tajikistan
Two permanent hydrometeorological monitoring stations have been installed in Tajikistan in the end of May / early June, 2012. The stations Dupuli and Ayvadzh are located in the western and southern most reaches of Tajikstan, near the borders to Uzbekistan, and Afghanistan, respectively. A team of scientists and technicians from Tajik Hydromet, CAIAG, and GFZ installed the stations and put them into operation.
New land cover products for Central Asia
Within the CAWa project, the team of the Land Surface Dynamics working group at the German Aerospace Center DLR/DFD has elaborated a set of new remote-sensing based, multi-temporal land cover products for the region of Central Asia. The products include (1) a land cover classification for the years 2001 and 2009, (2) water bodies for the period 2000-2010, (3) net primary productivity for Kazakhstan for the period 2003-2011, (3) daily snow cover for the period 2000-2011, and (4) a soil moisture product. The new data sets are the basis for current and future research activities focusing on change detection and the effects of atmospheric and terrestrial processes on land cover.
New mass balance measurements on Tien Shan and Alay glaciers
In a three week expedition in August 2012, a multi-national team of researchers from Kyrgyzstan, Germany, Switzerland and Austria measured the 2011/2012 ablation and accumulation on four glaciers in the Tien Shan and Alai mountains, among them the Golubin and the Abramov glaciers. The data will be used to compute the 2011/2012 mass balances of the glaciers.