## 4 Discussion  
The study area is mainly affected by the Indian Ocean monsoon, and most of the glaciers belong to marine-type glaciers. Compared with continental-type glaciers, these glaciers are characterized by high accumulation and high melting, and are very sensitive to climate change. In recent decades, due to global warming, the glaciers in this region have rapidly retreated. However, the precise interaction of the glaciers and the changing monsoon patterns is still unclear. Figure 11 shows the spatial distribution of near-surface temperature changes in the SETP from 2000 to 2014; the annual rate of temperature change in the southeastern part of the SETP showed a strong increasing trend, while the northwestern part of the SETP had a smaller increasing trend. Some lower-lying regions even exhibited a cooling trend. This pattern is consistent with the spatial distribution of the glacier mass loss rate in the study area which increased towards the SE. In addition, we selected three watersheds, 5O282B, 5O282A, and 5O281B, in the southeast-northwest direction with glacier surface elevation change rates of \(-\)0.841 \(\pm\) 0.005 m/yr, \(-\)0.577 \(\pm\) 0.005 m/yr, and \(-\)0.556 \(\pm\) 0.005 m/yr, respectively, for quantitative comparison. Through the above comparison and analysis, we found that there was a positive correlation between temperature change and glacier mass loss rate in the SETP region. The spatial distribution of surface precipitation changes shows that precipitation in the southeastern part of the SETP was increasing, while precipitation in the northwestern part of SETP was decreasing (Figure 12). This is contrary to the observed spatial distribution of glacier mass balance and suggests that the key climatic factor behind glacier retreat in this region is the changing temperature. According to the spatial distribution of temperature and precipitation changes, glaciers of the SETP are melting more rapidly as a seasonal trend, i.e., strong summer ablation due to the monsoon influence, which, in normal (i.e., equilibrium) circumstances, is counterbalanced by heavy accumulation in the winter. This seasonal equilibrium is broken and glaciers lose mass all over the region. This appears to be more pronounced in the SE,  
Figure 11: Spatial distribution of near-surface air temperature change rate in the SETP from 2000 to 2014.  
which means that ablation was increasing and/or accumulation was decreasing more here compared to other regions of the SETP. [PERSON] et al., [PERSON] et al., and [PERSON] et al. estimated the glacier mass balance in the SETP using satellite altimetry ICESat; their estimated annual glacier elevation change rates were \(-\)1.34 \(\pm\) 0.29 m/yr, \(-\)0.81 \(\pm\) 0.32 m/yr, and \(-\)0.30 \(\pm\) 0.13 m/yr, respectively [15; 16; 17] (Table 7). The estimate in this paper was \(-\)0.505 \(\pm\) 0.005 m/yr, which is consistent with the results of [PERSON] et al. [16] and [PERSON] et al. [17] Some of this discrepancy might be attributed to the different observational periods, i.e., ICESat covers the period between 2003 and 2009, while our results were obtained for 2000-2014. We also used a different methodology from these authors. Although the accuracy of satellite altimetry is high (\(\pm\)0.2 m in flat areas), these measurements are point-like, with a low resolution for a few or single glaciers. [PERSON] et al. estimated a mass balance of \(-\)0.39 \(\pm\) 0.16 m/yr for the glaciers in the SETP between 2000 and 2011 using SPOT-5 optical stereo pairs data and a C-band SRTM DEM [5]. This estimation aligns with our calculations fairly well, though a slight discrepancy still persists. We propose that the different spatial coverage of the [PERSON] et al. [5], which only covered about 1/3 of the SETP, could explain this. [PERSON] et al. estimated an average mass balance of \(-\)0.73 \(\pm\) 0.23 m/yr for the SETP using ASTER optical stereo image pair data from 2000 and 2016 [18]. Recently, [PERSON] et al.