Landsat-8 Project: Global Glacier Ice Velocity Maps, 1985-2018

Global land ice areas larger than 5 square km are covered by this dataset of ice velocities at 240-meter resolution. It was generated by NASA's MEaSUREs program using the autoRIFT algorithm on Landsat 4, 5, 7, and 8 optical image pairs, spanning from 1985 to 2018. Annual global coverage is nearly complete after the 2013 launch of Landsat 8.

Use Cases

• Modeling glacier mass balance and ice flow based on the derived velocity maps.
• Analyzing long-term trends in ice sheet dynamics based on the 33-year temporal coverage.
• Calibrating and validating ice flow models based on the 240-meter resolution velocity data.
• Studying the impact of climate change on specific glacier outlet areas based on the regional mosaics.

Strengths

• Provides a 33-year record from 1985 to 2018, enabling long-term trend analysis.
• Offers nearly complete annual global coverage after 2013 due to Landsat 8.
• Data is part of NASA's authoritative MEaSUREs program for research-quality records.

Limitations

• Data scarcity and low radiometric quality are significant limiting factors for many regions in earlier years.
• Column-level documentation is absent; field semantics must be inferred after download.
• Row count and dataset size are unknown, which may limit suitability assessment.

Provenance

Source

NASA Making Earth System Data Records for Use in Research Environments (MEaSUREs) program.

Collection Method

Generated using the autonomous Repeat Image Feature Tracking algorithm (autoRIFT) on Landsat and ASTER optical image pairs.

Time Range

1985 to 2018

Freshness

Last update date is unknown; freshness unverified.

Geography

Global, covering all land ice areas larger than 5 square km.