Randolph Glacier Inventory: Global Outlines and Attributes

The Randolph Glacier Inventory (RGI) provides a global snapshot of glacier outlines outside the ice sheets, with data for each glacier from approximately the year 2000. Version 7.0 was developed by the International Association of Cryospheric Sciences (IACS) Working Group, synthesizing contributions from the glaciological community to the GLIMS database. Data is packaged globally and by region, including shapefiles for outlines and CSV files for hypsometric attributes.

Use Cases

• Estimating glacier volumes and regional elevation change using hypsometric data and outlines.
• Modeling glacier responses to climatic forcing at regional and global scales.
• Providing a standardized baseline for glacier extent circa 2000 for comparative studies.
• Analyzing spatial distribution of glaciers by GTN-G defined regions using the provided shapefiles.

Strengths

• Provides a globally consistent snapshot from approximately the year 2000, enabling comparative analysis.
• Data is curated by the IACS Working Group, drawing from the community-maintained GLIMS database.
• Includes both geospatial outlines (shapefiles) and tabular attribute data (CSV) for each glacier.

Limitations

• Not suitable for measuring glacier-by-glacier rates of area change as it is a single temporal snapshot.
• Conflicting last updated dates exist between platforms (2026-03 12 on datagov vs. 2021-12-31 on nasa_earthdata).
• Specific row counts, column names, and total dataset size are not provided by any source.

Provenance

Source

International Association of Cryospheric Sciences (IACS) Working Group on the Randolph Glacier Inventory.

Collection Method

A subset of glacier outlines from the Global Land Ice Measurements from Space (GLIMS) database were extracted and reprocessed.

Time Range

circa 2000

Freshness

2026-03-12 22:26:38.259163

Geography

Global coverage of glaciers outside the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets.