Retreat of Aurine and Pusteresi Alps glaciers in the last decades from Landsat TM image on 2003 and previous results

This paper pre sents the results obtained from the analysis of one recent Lands at TM image for the study of the status of some glaciers on Eastern It alian Alps. Then these results are comp ared with a set of multi temporal Lands at images from the Eighti es. A fuzzy set based classification techn iqu e permitted to quanti fy snow and expo sed ice extents in glaciated areas. Integration with topograph ic inform ation allowed to derive the elevation of glacier term inus , although the result is overestimated due to some problems with digital elevation data and front al debris coverage. A comparison of front altitu de changes data derived from satellite image processing with elevation measured du ring field surveys supports the knowledge of the size of glacier reduction of the last decades. On Aurine and Pusteresi Alps glaciers, the changes in the last twenty years result to be a reduction corresponding to the 40% of the glaciated surface in the '80s , but a lot of the glaciers are now characterized by a new extent debri s coverage in the frontal zones.