Recent GLIMS activity at the National Snow and Ice Data Center
Abstract
While there are complete regional databases and incomplete global databases of Earth's glaciers, there are currently no geographically complete global glacier databases. Recent advances in technology have enabled the international project entitled Global Land Ice Measurements from Space (GLIMS) to assemble a Geographic Information System (GIS) of satellite-image-derived information on glaciers and ice sheets for all of Earth. This GIS is being contributed to, and will be used by, an international network of glaciological researchers. GLIMS participants at the US National Snow and Ice Data Center (Boulder, CO) have designed and implemented a comprehensive relational database to store glacier outlines, velocity fields, snow lines, glacier facies, and many other glacier data and metadata. Global monitoring of glaciers through GLIMS, and population of the NSIDC database, is just beginning; the global network of GLIMS Regional Centers can now contribute data derived from high quality satellite imagery to the database via the NSIDC GLIMS web site. Recent GLIMS activity includes the creation of new tools to facilitate the extraction of glaciological information from imagery, and from the data in the GLIMS database. We have written the Velocity Vector and Image Editing Widget (VelVIEW), a program to edit displacement vectors produced by cross-correlation software such as IMCORR. In another effort, glacier outlines and a digital elevation model (DEM), both extracted from ASTER data and potentially stored in the GLIMS database, have been combined to generate glacier area versus elevation statistics using GIS tools. This analysis has been performed for one glacier in the central Tien Shan and the results will be compared with historical data for this glacier.
- Publication:
-
EGS - AGU - EUG Joint Assembly
- Pub Date:
- April 2003
- Bibcode:
- 2003EAEJA....12328R