Using drone we created ultra high resolution maps, allowing us to track where ice and snow increased or melted on the ice sheet near India’s Maitri Station in Antarctica over days, weeks, and a full year. This approach shows how drone based monitoring can improve our understanding of ice changes in remote polar regions and support climate monitoring. We also documented some challenges faced in drone surveying and provided few practical recommendations for future studies.

Our long-term analysis (1992–2023) shows glaciers in the Zanskar Himalayas are slowing down, corresponding with an increasing glacier mass loss through thinning, resulting in reduction in driving stress. Although specific characteristics like terminus type modulate local flow, as seen by the higher velocity of lake-terminating glaciers. Overall, these results confirm a reduction in glacier health linked to climate warming, posing a serious threat to regional water security.

A comprehensive rock glacier inventory (n = 5492) has been generated through manual delineation in a GIS environment for the western Himalayan region. The inventory has characterized each rock glacier with 22 attributes following the standard protocols. This inventory shall serve as a baseline for the future research related to rock glacier dynamics, their hydrological contribution and response to climate change.

In situ techniques for snow depth (SD) measurement are not adequate to represent the spatiotemporal variability in SD in the Western Himalayan region. Therefore, this study focuses on the high-resolution mapping of daily snow depth in the Indian Western Himalayan region using passive microwave remote-sensing-based algorithms. Overall, the proposed multifactor SD models demonstrated substantial improvement compared to the operational products. However, there is a scope for further improvement.

GRACE/GRACE-FO provided global observations of water storage change since 2002. Scaling is a common approach to compensate for the spatial filtering inherent to the results. However, for complex hydrological basins, the compatibility of scaling with the characteristics of regional hydrology has been rarely assessed. We assess traditional scaling approaches and a new scaling approach for the Indus Basin. Our results will help users with regional focus understand implications of scaling choices.