GLIMS User Documentation

GLIMS Web Mapping Service: The GLIMS Web Mapping Service (WMS) was developed to provide the public with easy access to the GLIMS Glacier Database. Several layers in the WMS can be viewed and queried: Glacier Outlines, ASTER Footprints, Regional Center Locations, The World Glacier Inventory, and others. The GLIMS Glaciers layer contains the GLIMS glacier data. This layer can be viewed and queried, and query results can be downloaded into a number of GIS-compatible formats, including KML (for use in Google Earth), ESRI Shapefiles, MapInfo tables, Geographic Mark-up Language (GML), and GMT. The data within the GLIMS WMS are OGC compliant and can be served to other OGC-compliant services, thereby increasing the reach and utility of this glacier data set. See "Data Access".

• Description of fields (attributes) in downloaded data files

ASTER Data Acquisition Requests

At the ASTER Science Team meeting in June 2018 (Tokyo), a summary of the Science Team Acquisition Request (STAR) for GLIMS was presented.

Documentation and Tools for GLIMS collaborators

GLIMS Analysis

• Tutorials and How-to Guides
• Data Transfer Specification - A Method for Transferring GLIMS Analysis Products from Regional Centers to NSIDC
• Example data files, bundled in Zip format (New as of 2022-10-21)
• Example data files, bundled in Gzipped tar format (New as of 2022-10-21)
• Tools for Regional Centers.
• Contributing data to GLIMS and the RGI: If you have data to contribute to GLIMS (glacier outlines, center lines, snow lines, and the like), please let us know at glacierdata@nsidc.org. This will notify people in both the GLIMS and RGI (Randolph Glacier Inventory) communities. We are increasingly flexible on the formats of data that we can accept.

ASTER Imagery

• GLIMS originated as an ASTER Science Team project, and we tasked the ASTER instrument to acquire imagery over glacierized terrain. See the Data Acquisition Plan. The GLIMS community now maps glaciers using a variety of satellite platforms.
• ASTER Data Access, distributed by the Land Processes Distributed Active Archive Center. This is a good starting point for obtaining various data sets from the LP-DAAC.

GLIMS Glacier Database

• Database Design Description
• GLIMS Glacier Database and user metrics

Miscellaneous

• Satellite Instrument Comparison - Comparison of capabilities of different satellite instruments
• Download the GLIMS Logo. Encapsulated PostScript, small PNG, large PNG. The logo should be used only for GLIMS-related presentations and posters.