GLIMS highlights for 2016

There were several big accomplishments in GLIMS during 2016. Perhaps the most important is, with the ingest of many new data sets, that GLIMS is now globally complete. In addition, 87000 glaciers have outlines from more than one time. Thanks to NASA, GLIMS funding is sufficient to take in more glacier data as it is produced by our collaborators, and to make improvements in technical infrastructure. In 2017 we intend to continue with these activities, as well as increase our capability to ingest and provide more topographic data related to the glaciers of the world.

Additional Highlights

• Formation and announcement of the GLIMS Core Team.
• Further progress on data model migration to deal with multi-temporal data better.
• Modernized GLIMS data download system.
• Co-organized an EGU session related to GLIMS and the Global Terrestrial Network for Glaciers (GTN-G). "Glacier Monitoring From In-Situ and Remotely Sensed Observations"
• Updated the Fluctuations of Glaciers data set provided in the GLIMS glacier and GTN-G metadata browsers.
• Improved the set of fields shown in the glacier query in the GLIMS map interface
• Organized an AGU session related to GLIMS and the Global Terrestrial Network for Glaciers (GTN-G). "Glacier Monitoring From In-Situ and Remotely Sensed Observations"
• Held a GLIMS meeting at the AGU Fall Meeting.

Details on new GLIMS data

• Shyok Basin (in upper Indus basin), from Rakesh Bhambri
• Central Pamir, from Rakesh Bhambri. This included correction the geolocation of the existing GLIMS polygons.
• Ladakh region, from Thomas Chudley and Evan Miles
• Uzbekistan glaciers, from Eleonora Semakova
• Swiss glacier inventory for five years: 1850, 1973, 1999, 2003, 2010; from Frank Paul et al.
• Austrian glacier inventory for four years: 1850, 1969, 1998, 2006; from Andrea Fischer
• Re-ingest of Norwegian glacier inventory to fix a nunatak drop-out problem pointed out by Liss Andreassen.
• Antarctic Peninsula outlines from Jacqueline Huber and Allison Cook, including hypsometric data
• Italian glacier outlines from Claudio Smiraglia
• Lower-48 USA outlines from Andrew Fountain.
• Data from the RGI: Alaska, Asian regions, South America, Canada.

We look forward more productive activity and interactions with the scientific community in 2017.