Abstract
Abstract. Glacier inventories provide the basis for further studies on mass balance and volume change, relevant for local hydrological issues as well as for global calculation of sea level rise. In this study, a new Austrian glacier inventory has been compiled, updating data from 1969 (GI 1) and 1998 (GI 2) based on high-resolution lidar digital elevation models (DEMs) and orthophotos dating from 2004 to 2012 (GI 3). To expand the time series of digital glacier inventories in the past, the glacier outlines of the Little Ice Age maximum state (LIA) have been digitalized based on the lidar DEM and orthophotos. The resulting glacier area for GI 3 of 415.11 ± 11.18 km2 is 44% of the LIA area. The annual relative area losses are 0.3% yr−1 for the ~119-year period GI LIA to GI 1 with one period with major glacier advances in the 1920s. From GI 1 to GI 2 (29 years, one advance period of variable length in the 1980s) glacier area decreased by 0.6% yr−1 and from GI 2 to GI 3 (10 years, no advance period) by 1.2% yr−1. Regional variability of the annual relative area loss is highest in the latest period, ranging from 0.3 to 6.19% yr−1. The mean glacier size decreased from 0.69 km2 (GI 1) to 0.46 km2 (GI 3), with 47% of the glaciers being smaller than 0.1 km2 in GI 3 (22%).
Highlights
The history of growth and decay of mountain glaciers affects society in the form of global changes in sea level and in the regional hydrological system as well as through glacierrelated natural disasters
In recent years the information available on global glacier cover has increased rapidly, with global glacier inventories compiled for the IPCC Report 2013 (Vaughan et al, 2013) complementing the world glacier inventories (WGMS and National Snow and Ice Data Center, 2012) and the one compiled by participants of the Global Land Ice Measurement from Space (GLIMS) initiative (Kargel et al, 2014)
GI Little Ice Age (LIA) was not corrected for glaciers which completely disappeared before glacier inventories 1969 (GI 1), so that the area in this study is 4.4 km2 smaller than the 945.5 km2 found by Groß (1987)
Summary
The history of growth and decay of mountain glaciers affects society in the form of global changes in sea level and in the regional hydrological system as well as through glacierrelated natural disasters. In recent years the information available on global glacier cover has increased rapidly, with global glacier inventories compiled for the IPCC Report 2013 (Vaughan et al, 2013) complementing the world glacier inventories (WGMS and National Snow and Ice Data Center, 2012) and the one compiled by participants of the Global Land Ice Measurement from Space (GLIMS) initiative (Kargel et al, 2014) These global inventories serve as a basis for modelling current and future global changes in ice mass (e.g. Gardner et al, 2013; Marzeion et al, 2012; Radicand Hock, 2014). Based on the glacier inventories, ice volume has been modelled with different methods, partly as a basis for future sea level scenarios (Huss and Farinotti, 2012; Linsbauer et al, 2012; Radicet al., 2014; Grinsted, 2013)
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