GLIMS: Progress in mapping the world’s glaciers

Abstract

The Global Land Ice Measurement from Space (GLIMS) project is a cooperative effort of over sixty institutions world-wide with the goal of inventorying a majority of the world's estimated 160 000 glaciers. Data sent from Regional Center analysts to the GLIMS team at the National Snow and Ice Data Center (NSIDC) in Boulder, Colorado are inserted into a geospatial database. The GLIMS Glacier Database now contains outlines of over 58 000 glaciers. As submissions to the database from all over the world increase, we find that we must accommodate a greater diversity in the character and quality of the data submitted than was originally anticipated. We present an overview of the current glacier outline inventory, and examine issues related to data coverage, and data quality. A significant achievement of the GLIMS project is that the database and interfaces to it, as well as the GLIMSView tool, provided to help in the production of GLIMS analyses, are all built from open source software.Issues we've dealt with to achieve a high-quality glacier database include: 1. data submitted without proper metadata; 2. data submitted with incorrect georegistration; 3. varying analyst interpretations of what exactly constitutes a glacier; 4. arbitrary termination of glacier boundaries at political boundaries; 5. arbitrary termination of glacier boundaries at edges of available satellite images.

Satellite observations show no net change in the percentage of supraglacial debris-covered area in northern Pakistan from 1977 to 2014

“…Another critical element, illustrated in Figure 11c, is whether stagnant ice is included as part of a glacier. While stagnant ice is included in the Global Land Ice Measurements from Space (GLIMS) definition of a glacier (Raup and Khalsa, 2007), we found the classical definition of a glacier, requiring deformation from glacier flow, to be more desirable and less ambiguous to implement. However, problems arise with the classical definition when stagnant ice becomes reactivated and glacier mass is gained through accretion.…”

Tracing glacier changes in Austria from the Little Ice Age to the present using a lidar-based high-resolution glacier inventory in Austria

“…If a glacier had disintegrated in the inventory of 2006, one ID refers to polygons consisting of several parts of a formerly connected glacier area. For the disintegration of glaciers, the parent and child IDs as used in the GLIMS inventories (Raup et al, 2007;Raup and Khalsa, 2010) are a good solution. Going backwards in time, e.g.…”

A complete glacier inventory of the Antarctic Peninsula based on Landsat 7 images from 2000 to 2002 and other preexisting data sets

“…The data set with the complete information has not been published so far and has been generated and provided by A. Cook in the framework of this study in the WGS84 Stereographic South Pole projection. Whereas the catchment outlines provide a solid foundation for the generation of a glacier inventory, rock outcrops are part of the glacierized area and need to be removed (Raup and Khalsa, 2010).…”