GLIMS Book and the Satellite Image Atlas

[Jeff Kargel]

Dear all,

In a discussion this afternoon, the question arose about the uniqueness and utility of the GLIMS book when we already have the nearly completed many-volume Satellite Image Atlas of the World's Glaciers (R.S. Williams, et al., eds.).   (Henceforth, "The Atlas")

The Atlas is very much an atlas of glaciers with rich scientific text-- a needed, highly useful, comprehensive volume with some limited higher-level analysis and detailed, richly referenced anecdotes and summaries of related information, such as mass balance records and air photo/field photo histories in some cases.  The GLIMS book will not yet be comprehensive in the way that the Atlas is (not nearly so), and it will tend to be more quantitative and have a variety of high-level analysis products of typoes that generally are not presented in the Atlas; so what ithe GLIMS book will lack in comprehensiveness, it will add depth and sophistication of analysis in many regards.  But we are not yet to the point where we can do anything like the Atlas in producing a uniform and complete product.  This is, of course, the goal of GLIMS, but we are far from yet achieving that goal.  So this book is an intermediate report, ranking somewhere between the ultmate goal and the existing GLIMS consortium journal papers that have so far appeared (such as the Kargel et al. paper in RSE in 2005, the Raup et al. 2006 paper on analysis methodologies Computers & Geoscience, and the paper on remote sensing of mountain geomorphology by Bishop et al. in 2003).

The individual chapters will vary in what they present and how they do it.  I do not expect that every subregion can be presented in any level of detail when regions are given 10 or maybe 20 book pages (compared to many hundreds of pages for several of the Image Atlas volumes).  In the GLIMS book, the key examples and regional/topical analyses have to be showcases-- but substantive ones, where significant science is presented that goes beyond atlas-type documentation.  Taken together, the GLIMS book will have a definite global representation, though not statistically so; global implications can be drawn, with some insights available from the GLIMS book that will not be readily taken from the Atlas (and vice versa).  This book will certainly not be an atlas, although authors are free to summarize their atlas-type work or update aspects of what appeared in the Atlas volumes.  

There will be a DVD supplement to the GLIMS book, so that particularly advanced RCs or stewards can present much more comprehensive information that may include atlas-type comprehensiveness (which may not have had a chance to get into the appropriate Atlas volume) , or some in-depth analysis of anything of interest, and PR-type materials (fly-over movies, animations of glacier changes, climate change animations relevant to glaciers, compendia of field photos at high resolution, etc.).  Todd Albert, for instance, asked whether he would be able to present a 3D interactive (rotatable) map of the  glacier retreat on Quelccaya ice capo-- the answer is yes, if the data format is a common one or can be provided as freeware on the DVD.

I do not think that this book will resemble in any way the Atlas, which will remain the state of the art in that type of work for at least several years to come; and probably longer in many regions.  

--Jeff