A Remote Sensing-Driven Dynamic Risk Assessment Model for Cyclical Glacial Lake Outbursts: A Case Study of Merzbacher Lake

The increasing threat of Glacial Lake Outburst Floods (GLOFs), intensified by climate change, underscores the urgency for developing advanced early warning systems. The near-annual, cyclical outbursts of Lake Merzbacher in the Tien Shan mountains present a severe downstream threat, yet its remote location and lack of instrumentation pose a significant challenge to traditional monitoring. To bridge this gap, we develop and validate a dynamic risk assessment framework driven entirely by remote sensing data. Methodologically, the framework introduces an innovative Ice-Water Composite Index (IWCI) to resolve the challenge of lake area extraction under mixed ice-water conditions. This is coupled with a high-fidelity 5 m resolution Digital Elevation Model (DEM) of the lake basin, autonomously generated from GF-7 Dual-Line Camera (DLC) imagery, which enables accurate daily volume retrieval. Through systematic feature engineering, nine key hydro-thermal drivers are quantified from MODIS and other products to train a Random Forest (RF) machine learning model, establishing the non-linear relationship between catchment processes and lake volume. The model demonstrates robust predictive performance on an independent validation set (2023–2024) (R2 = 0.80, RMSE = 5.15 × 106 m3), accurately captures the complete lake-filling cycle from initiation to near-peak stage. Furthermore, feature importance analysis quantitatively confirms that Positive Accumulated Temperature (PAT) is the dominant physical mechanism governing the lake’s storage dynamics. This end-to-end framework offers a transferable paradigm for GLOF hazard management, enabling a critical shift from static, regional assessments to dynamic, site-specific early warning in data-scarce alpine regions.