Help shape the future of global glacier inventories¶
The Randolph Glacier Inventory (RGI) and the Global Land Ice Measurements from Space (GLIMS) initiative have served the glacier community for many years. Following the completion of the IACS Working Group on the Randolph Glacier Inventory that delivered RGI 7, we are now preparing the next step: a new IACS Standing Group on Glacier Inventories. IACS standing groups provide a longer-term structure for activities of importance to the cryospheric community.
We are looking for new people to join this effort and help shape its direction.
Why a Standing Group?¶
GLIMS and the RGI have distinct purposes, but they are increasingly intertwined.
GLIMS provides a long-term, community-driven archive of glacier outlines from around the world and from different points in time. The RGI builds on GLIMS to provide a carefully selected, globally complete reference inventory designed for applications such as glacier modelling, geodetic mass balance assessments, and much more.
The production of RGI 7.0 showed that the relationship goes both ways: while RGI7 was built from GLIMS, the process also encouraged new submissions, corrections and improvements to GLIMS. Maintaining either resource therefore increasingly depends on maintaining the other.
At the same time, glacier inventories are meeting new challenges. Satellite data, automated mapping methods and increasingly dense time series make it possible to move beyond snapshots towards richer records of glacier change. Making these datasets useful requires more than producing glacier outlines: glaciers need to be consistently identified and linked through time, quality and provenance need to be documented, and the resulting data need sustainable infrastructure and long-term stewardship.
We therefore see a need for a permanent community group concerned not only with one particular RGI release, but with the long-term development, coordination and stewardship of global glacier inventory data, in coordination with the National Snow and Ice Data Center (NSIDC) and the World Glacier Monitoring Service (WGMS).
What would the Standing Group do?¶
The proposed Standing Group would bring the RGI and GLIMS efforts under a common scientific umbrella while retaining their complementary roles.
Its long-term goals are still under development but they would include:
- improving local to regional glacier inventories and associated attributes from local to global scales;
- strengthening the connection between GLIMS, the RGI and the communities producing and using glacier inventory data;
- improving the FAIR provision, documentation, exploration and long-term preservation of glacier inventory data;
- developing methods to link individual glaciers across inventories, enabling robust glacier-specific change assessments through time;
- coordinating future reference global inventories at different target dates; and
- encouraging and facilitating contributions from the wider glacier community.
One obvious near-term challenge is a new global reference inventory around 2020 (RGI 8). The Standing Group would help define what such an RGI should look like, coordinate the community effort required to produce it, and ensure that it connects coherently with both RGI 7 and the growing collection of inventories available through GLIMS.
Another immediate task is to support the ongoing transition of GLIMS. With long-term data curation and infrastructure provided by the National Snow and Ice Data Center (NSIDC), there is an opportunity to renew the scientific and community leadership around GLIMS and rethink how submissions, quality control and community contributions should work in the coming years.
We are looking for new people¶
For this to work, the upcoming Standing Group will need to represent more than the people who have led the RGI and GLIMS in the past.
We are therefore inviting expressions of interest from researchers and data providers who would like to participate in the new group. We particularly welcome people who have not previously been closely involved with RGI or GLIMS, including early-career researchers and colleagues from regions that have historically been less represented in global glacier inventory efforts.
There will be different ways to contribute, ranging from co-chair and steering roles with regular involvement in the direction and operation of the group, to an advisory board and wider group membership for people who would like to contribute expertise, data and ideas without being involved in day-to-day coordination.
Experience producing glacier outlines is certainly valuable, but it is not a requirement. We would also like to hear from people working with glacier inventories in modelling, remote sensing, change detection, data infrastructure, regional assessments and other applications. In particular, we want the future direction of these datasets to be shaped by both their producers and users.
Interested in contributing? Fill in our short survey and tell us a little about your background, interests and the role you might like to take.
We hope the new Standing Group will provide a home for the community effort around glacier inventories for many years to come. If you use, produce, or simply care about these datasets, we hope you will consider getting involved!
Fabien Maussion and Regine Hock
Co-Chairs, IACS Working Group on the Randolph Glacier Inventory