World Glacier Inventory

The World Glacier Inventory (WGI) contains information for over 130,000 glaciers. Inventory parameters include geographic location, area, length, orientation, elevation, and classification. The WGI is based primarily on aerial photographs and maps with most glaciers having one data entry only. Hence, the data set can be viewed as a snapshot of the glacier distribution in the second half of the 20th century. It is based on the original WGI (WGMS 1989) from the World Glacier Monitoring Service (WGMS).

There are a number of ways to retrieve the data. You can download the entire database in a single ASCII text file from the FTP site: wgi_feb2012.csv (37 MB). You can search the entire WGI by glacier id, glacier name, or latitude/longitude (as well as other parameters) using the main Search Inventory interface . You can also search using the Extract Selected Regions interface.