Time series of transient snowline altitudes for High Mountain Asia, 1985–2021, derived from remote sensing data using Google Earth Engine

DOI

Here we present a dataset of Transient Snowline Altitude (TSLA) measurements for glaciers in High Mountain Asia (HMA) based on Landsat satellite imagery and digital elevation model data. The data were obtained using the MountAiN glacier Transient snowline Retrieval Algorithm (MANTRA), a Google Earth Engine tool to measure the average altitude of the snow-ice boundary. Each MANTRA result consists of reference data (e.g. Landsat scene, date, glacier ID), relevant topographic metrics (glacier area, minimum and maximum elevation of the glacier), results of the surface material classification (areas covered by ice, snow, debris and clouds), summary statistics of the TSLA measurement, and quality metrics (cloud cover close to snow-ice boundary, class coverage). For the dataset presented here, we applied MANTRA to all glaciers in HMA with an area larger than 0.5 km² (ca. 28,500 based on Randolph Glacier Inventory v6 glacier outlines). After filtering and postprocessing, the dataset comprises ca. 9.66 million TSLA measurements with an average of 341 ± 160 measurements per glacier, covering the time span 1985 to 2021.

Time series of Transient Snowline Altitude (TSLA) metrics for glaciers in High Mountain Asia, 1986 to 2021.The file is in NetCDF format, with the date of the Landsat measurement (LS_DATE) as index.Individual glacier are identified through Randolph Glacier Inventory v6 IDs (RGI_ID).The recommended metric to use for analyses is the median elevation of the detected TSLA range (TSLrange_median_masl).

Identifier
DOI https://doi.org/10.1594/PANGAEA.953619
Metadata Access https://ws.pangaea.de/oai/provider?verb=GetRecord&metadataPrefix=datacite4&identifier=oai:pangaea.de:doi:10.1594/PANGAEA.953619
Provenance
Creator Loibl, David (ORCID: 0000-0002-7583-999X); Grünberg, Inge ORCID logo; Richter, Niklas
Publisher PANGAEA
Publication Year 2023
Funding Reference German Research Foundation https://doi.org/10.13039/501100001659 Crossref Funder ID LO 2285/1-1 https://gepris.dfg.de/gepris/projekt/356944332 Topoclimatic forcing and non-linear dynamics in the climate change adaption of glaciers in High Mountain Asia (TopoCliF)
Rights Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International; https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
OpenAccess true
Representation
Resource Type Dataset
Format application/x-hdf
Size 3.3 GBytes
Discipline Geosciences; Geospheric Sciences; Glaciology; Natural Sciences
Spatial Coverage (58.220W, 24.320S, 122.480E, 49.190N); Asia