GLIMS Data Acquisition Plan

The primary data source for the GLIMS project is ASTER, with complete coverage of the world's glaciers (except the interiors of Greenland and Antarctica) nominally occurring once per year. Before the launch of ASTER, we submitted a map of the the world's land ice to the ASTER mission planners in Japan (see Raup and others 2000).

This monitoring was originally planned to involve acquiring approximately 5000 60 km x 60 km scenes per year, apportioned equitably over all the GLIMS Regions. Results have been mixed, with the result that we have had to update relative priorities between the regions in order to fill holes in coverage.

In the original plan, we estimated the numbers of scenes necessary for complete coverage of each geographical region, which are tabulated here.