Abstract
The archipelago of Svalbard presently contains approximately 33,200 km2 of glaciers, with a large number of small valley glaciers as well as large areas of contiguous icefields and ice caps. While the first glacier inventory was compiled in 1993, there has not been a readily available digital version. Here we present a new digital glacier database, which is being made available through the GLIMS project (Global Land Ice Measurements from Space). Glacier outlines have been created for 1936, 1966–1971, 1990, and 2001–2010. For most glaciers, outlines are available from more than one of these years. Complete coverage of Svalbard is available for the 2001–2010 dataset. Glacier outlines were created using cartographic data from the original Norwegian Polar Institute topographic map series of Svalbard as the basis by delineating individual glaciers and ice streams, assigning unique identification codes relating to hydrological watersheds, digitizing centerlines, and providing a number of attributes for each glacier mask. The 2001–2010 glacier outlines are derived from orthorectified satellite images acquired from SPOT-5 and ASTER satellite sensors. In areas where coverage for all time periods is available, the overwhelming majority of glaciers are observed to be in sustained retreat over the period from 1936 to 2010.
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Acknowledgments
We thank Harald Faste Aas, Roger Willy Olaussen, and Anders Skoglund for providing the topographic data and for advice regarding these data.Also, Boele Kuipers for advice on GIS matters. The ASTER orthorectified images and SilcAst DEMs were provided within the framework of the Global Land Ice Measurements from Space project (GLIMS) through the USGS LPDAAC and are courtesy of NASA/GSFC/METI/ERSDAC/JAROS and the U.S./Japan ASTER Science Team. The SPOT-5 HRS orthorectified images and DEMs were obtained through the IPY SPIRIT project (Korona et al. 2009) © CNES 2008 and SPOT Image 2008 all rights reserved. This work is a contribution to the ESA Climate Change Initiative Project “Glaciers CCI” (Essential Climate Variable CCI ECV Glaciers and Ice Caps). This work is in part funded by the Norwegian Space Centre as part of ESA’s PRODEX program through the CryoClim project
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König, M., Nuth, C., Kohler, J., Moholdt, G., Pettersen, R. (2014). A digital glacier database for svalbard. In: Kargel, J., Leonard, G., Bishop, M., Kääb, A., Raup, B. (eds) Global Land Ice Measurements from Space. Springer Praxis Books(). Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-540-79818-7_10
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-540-79818-7_10
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