Located in southeastern Tibetan Plateau, the Kangri Karpo Mountains extents about 280 km from north-west to south-east, south of Bomê County and neighboring Motuo, Zayü and Basu counties. It has a geographic extent of 29°00′N – 29°30′N, 96°20′E – 97°00′E. The Kangri Karpo Mountains is one of the most important and concentrated regions of maritime (temperate) glacier development. Its glacier area changes have important impact on local and regional water resources. This Kangri Karpo glacier dataset (1980 – 2015) was developed by integrating several data sources: the Glacier Inventory Dataset produced in the 1980s by the Cold and Arid Regions Environmental and Engineering Research Institute of Chinese Academy of Sciences, the topographic maps and aerial photographs in 1980 and Landsat images in 2001, 2002 and 2015. ArcGIS and ENVI softwares were used to combine bands, do data design and perform manual visual interpretation and band ratio segmentation. Two data subsets are presented here: ① geographic extent of the study region in shapefile format, and ② glacier outlines in shapefile format. The dataset reflects the glaciers’ changing boundaries during 1980 – 2015, and can be used for research on the glacier and climate changes over southeastern Tibetan Plateau.
