Page 57 - Smart City Brochure

Disaster Management
Glacier Lake Outburst Flood (GLOF)

The acronym GLOF is used for glacier floods caused by the drainage of naturally dammed lakes in the
glacier, on or at the margin of glaciers.
A lake outburst can be triggered by several factors: ice or rock avalanches, the collapse of the moraine
dams due to the melting of ice buried within, the washing out of fine material by springs flowing through

the dam (piping), earthquakes or sudden inputs of water into the lake e.g. through heavy rains or
drainage from lakes further up-glacier. The glacier lake may breach at the end-moraine or at the lateral
moraine.

CDAC’s GLOFswill help the Government authorities in case of an impending GLOF event. The GLOF Early
Warning System has the following capabilities:

 Water Level Sensors developed indigenously by C-DAC
 The near-real time sensors transmit data through INSAT satellite to control centre

 The flood simulation model runs the simulation for various GLOF scenarios. The model is capable of
presenting Flood Simulation, Inundation information and Flood Arrival Time in the event of a glacier
lake outburst flood

The GLOF Analysis Tool is the main interface of the GLOF Management System. The GLOF Analysis Tool
has three sub-tools: Lake Information, Simulation & the Sensor Information.
The "Lake Information" tool gives basic information about the glacial lake selected by the user from the
drop-down menu, such as, Lake Name, Lake Condition, etc. The satellite image of the glacial lake is

shown on the right hand side.
The Simulate tool gives information regarding the GLOF simulation progress and the outputs of the
simulation. The user will be able to see the time at which the GLOF at a particular glacial lake occurred
and the period of GLOF simulation. The user can choose to see the simulation results such as Simulation

video, Inundation map, Inundation report & Hydrographs.
The Sensor Information tool gives basic information about the sensors deployed at the glacial lakes for
monitoring water-levels. Each sensor has a Sensor ID linked to the Lake ID. The user may add
information of new sensors when sensors are deployed on new glacial lakes in future or delete existing

ones, in case if they are decommissioned.
The Settings tool gives the user the flexibility to load the input data from any location
on the computer. The data will be copied to an in-built database system for computations.

Website: https://cdac.in/index.aspx?id=st_ssdm_ssdm_glof