Figure 1

(a) Map of the study area. The dry-season snow cover extent was retrieved from Landsat imagery over the 22 zones indicated by the rectangles. Names used to identify these zones were quoted from cities or towns nearby. Topographic information for this plot was obtained from the CIAT-CSI SRTM website⁶⁷. (b) Boxplot of the dry-season snow cover extent over the period 1986–2005 (red) and over the period 2006–2015 (blue), in the 22 zones indicated in (a). In each box, the central mark (white stripe) indicates the median, and the edges indicate the 25th and 75th percentiles. The whiskers extend to the most extreme data points not considered outliers, and the outliers are plotted individually using the ‘+’ symbol. Plots were generated by using PYTHON’s Matplotlib Library⁶⁸.