Abstract
Abstract. Although worldwide inventories of glacier area have been coordinated internationally for several decades, a similar effort for glacier ice thicknesses was only initiated in 2013. Here, we present the third version of the Glacier Thickness Database (GlaThiDa v3), which includes 3 854 279 thickness measurements distributed over roughly 3000 glaciers worldwide. Overall, 14 % of global glacier area is now within 1 km of a thickness measurement (located on the same glacier) – a significant improvement over GlaThiDa v2, which covered only 6 % of global glacier area and only 1100 glaciers. Improvements in measurement coverage increase the robustness of numerical interpolations and model extrapolations, resulting in better estimates of regional to global glacier volumes and their potential contributions to sea-level rise. In this paper, we summarize the sources and compilation of glacier thickness data and the spatial and temporal coverage of the resulting database. In addition, we detail our use of open-source metadata formats and software tools to describe the data, validate the data format and content against this metadata description, and track changes to the data following modern data management best practices. Archived versions of GlaThiDa are available from the World Glacier Monitoring Service (e.g., v3.1.0, from which this paper was generated: https://doi.org/10.5904/wgms-glathida-2020-10; GlaThiDa Consortium, 2020), while the development version is available on GitLab (https://gitlab.com/wgms/glathida, last access: 9 November 2020).
Highlights
A central challenge of glaciology is assessing the distribution and total ice volume of the world’s glaciers
Airborne glacier thickness profiles collected by National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) Operation IceBridge were retrieved from the corresponding National Snow and Ice Data Center (NSIDC) data portals
To evaluate the spatial coverage of GlaThiDa with respect to the world’s roughly 217 000 glaciers (RGI Consortium, 2017), we assigned each survey to glaciers in the Randolph Glacier Inventory (RGI 6.0) by intersecting point measurements and nominal glacier centerpoints with RGI glacier outlines
Summary
A central challenge of glaciology is assessing the distribution and total ice volume of the world’s glaciers. Detailed and globally complete inventories of the world’s glaciers (WGMS and NSIDC, 2012; GLIMS and NSIDC, 2018; RGI Consortium, 2017) have been compiled with great effort over the last few decades. These inventories have been limited to glacier extent and surface elevation. GlaThiDa v2 was subsequently used to calibrate all participating models and evaluate model performance for an ensemble-based estimate of the thicknesses of all glaciers on Earth (Farinotti et al, 2019)
Sign-in/Register to view highlights & summary Talk to us
Join us for a 30 min session where you can share your feedback and ask us any queries you have
Schedule a callDisclaimer: All third-party content on this website/platform is and will remain the property of their respective owners and is provided on "as is" basis without any warranties, express or implied. Use of third-party content does not indicate any affiliation, sponsorship with or endorsement by them. Any references to third-party content is to identify the corresponding services and shall be considered fair use under The CopyrightLaw.
