Abstract
Abstract Gridded glacier datasets are essential for various glaciological and climatological research because they link glacier cover with the corresponding gridded meteorological variables. However, there are significant differences between the gridded data and the shapefile data in the total area calculations in the Randolph Glacier Inventory (RGI) 6.0 at global and regional scales. Here, we present a new global gridded glacier dataset based on the RGI 6.0 that eliminates the differences. The dataset is made by dividing the glacier polygons using cell boundaries and then recalculating the area of each polygon in the cell. Our dataset (1) exhibits a good agreement with the RGI area values for those regions in which gridded areas showed a generally good consistency with those in the shapefile data, and (2) reduces the errors existing in the current RGI gridded dataset. All data and code used in this study are freely available and we provide two examples to demonstrate the application of this new gridded dataset.
Highlights
Since the release of its first version in February 2012, the Randolph Glacier Inventory (RGI) has been a centerpiece of glaciological research and successfully applied in a range of glacier change studies, as well as in impact assessments of glacial change at global and regional scales (Pfeffer and others, 2014; Hock and others, 2019)
We identify errors in the currently available global gridded glacier dataset and present a new global gridded glacier dataset based on the RGI 6.0 which used an alternative gridding method to eliminate the errors
We present the new global gridded glacier dataset based on the RGI 6.0
Summary
Since the release of its first version in February 2012, the Randolph Glacier Inventory (RGI) has been a centerpiece of glaciological research and successfully applied in a range of glacier change studies, as well as in impact assessments of glacial change at global and regional scales (Pfeffer and others, 2014; Hock and others, 2019). There are significant differences in total glacierized area between the gridded and the shapefile data in RGI 6.0, at both global and regional scales (Table 1).
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