[GLIMS] Randolph Glacier Inventory: version 5.0 now available

[Graham Cogley]

Dear GLIMSListers - The IACS Working Group on the Randolph Glacier Inventory and
Infrastructure for Glacier Monitoring is happy to be able to announce the release
of version 5.0 of the Randolph Glacier Inventory, now available at
http://glims.org/RGI/index.html with its accompanying Technical Note. Version 5.0
has completely new coverage of most of Asia, updates in the Pyrenees and Labrador,
and corrections and improvements elsewhere. As in version 4.0, more than 99% of
the glaciers are accompanied by hypsometric data, and the proportion with date
information now also exceeds 99%. The number of glaciers in the Randolph inventory
has increased to 211,000 and their total area has decreased to 705,400 km^2.

 

The inventory now includes links to some of the glaciers for which mass-balance
measurements are recorded in the Fluctuations of Glaciers database of the World
Glacier Monitoring Service. As a contribution to infrastructure for glacier
monitoring, the Working Group intends to increase the number and scope of these
linkages in future releases. Fabien Maussion (University of Innsbruck) has a
student who will work on this expansion.

 

Work on convergence between the Randolph dataset and the GLIMS Glacier Database is
also proceeding. Randolph coverage of New Zealand, the Greenland Periphery, and
the Antarctic and Subantarctic glaciers has already been added to GLIMS, and
inclusion of other regions is well advanced. Bruce Raup will give occasional
progress reports on this aspect of the convergence. Future submissions to the two
data sources will be handled in parallel.

 

An important point for those whose contributions to the Randolph inventory are
replaced in new versions is that the Working Group will ensure that they do not
disappear. They will be transferred to GLIMS if they are not there already.

 

There is lots more work ongoing to make the RGI and GLIMS more compatible with
each other and to make sure that the strengths of the two data sources - a
complete, one-time, version-controlled snapshot of glacier polygons with standard
attributes, as opposed to a rich, diverse, multi-temporal resource of digital
glacier data of all kinds - can be exploited to the full.

 

One of the outcomes of a workshop on the future of the RGI, held in Prague at the
IUGG on 24 June, was the establishment of a number of subgroups to consider
special problems:

Differences between Large-scale Inventories (F. Paul)

 

Regions of Concern (G. Cogley)

 

Linkages between Databases (G. Cogley)

 

Enlarged Randolph Attribute Set (R. Hock)

 

These subgroups (convenors named in parentheses) are to report by December 2015
and are described in more detail in the attachment. There is no restriction on
membership, and if you would like to help you will be very welcome. Let us know!

 

We hope that version 5.0 of the Randolph inventory will be useful to many of you
and that you will continue to make the fruits of your work available for the
advancement of glaciology.

 

With best wishes,

Working Group on the Randolph Glacier Inventory and Infrastructure for Glacier
Monitoring,

International Association of Cryospheric Sciences (IACS).

http://www.cryosphericsciences.org/wg_randGlacierInv.html

 Graham Cogley and Regine Hock (Co-chairs),

Etienne Berthier, Andrew Bliss, Tobias Bolch, Koji Fujita, Alex Gardner, Matthias
Huss, Georg Kaser, Christian Kienholz, Anil Kulkarni, Shiyin Liu, Christopher
Nuth, Ben Marzeion, Takayuki Nuimura, Frank Paul, Valentina Radic, Bruce Raup,
Akiko Sakai, Donghui Shangguan and Arun Shrestha.

 

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