Skip to main content
  1. ScienceBase Catalog
  2. Alaska Science Center (ASC)
  3. _Water Ice & Landscapes
  4. Annual End-of-Summer Snow Cover on Glaciers in Alaska and Northwest Canada

Annual End-of-Summer Snow Cover on Glaciers in Alaska and Northwest Canada

Dates

Publication Date
Start Date
2018
End Date
2022

Citation

Zeller, L., McGrath, D., Sass, L., Florentine, C., Downs, J., 2024, Annual end-of-summer snow cover on glaciers in Alaska and Northwest Canada: U.S. Geological Survey data release, https://doi.org/10.5066/P1QHST6F.

Summary

This dataset contains observations of the distribution of end-of-summer snow cover on approximately 3000 glaciers across Alaska and Northwest Canada. The data are provided as: (1) GeoTIFF rasters indicating the spatial extent of end-of-summer snow cover on each glacier's surface in each year (one raster per glacier per year), and (2) yearly tables with the equilibrium line altitude and the accumulation area ratio of the glaciers derived from the snow cover extent geotiffs. Snow cover was identified in Sentinel-2 imagery using a random forest algorithm trained with a manually-created validation dataset. A series of post-processing steps were used to infill missing data from terrain shadowing and cloud cover, and to identify the imagery [...]

Contacts

Point of Contact :
Alaska Science Center
Originator :
Lucas Zeller, Daniel McGrath, Louis Sass, Caitlyn E Florentine, Jacob Z Downs
Metadata Contact :
Alaska Science Center
Publisher :
Alaska Science Center
Distributor :
USGS ScienceBase Team
SDC Data Owner :
Alaska Science Center
USGS Mission Area :
Ecosystems

Attached Files

Click on title to download individual files attached to this item.

glacier_snowCover_alaska-NWcanada_metadata.xml
Original FGDC Metadata
View 		21.15 KB application/fgdc+xml
glacier_snowCover_alaska-NWcanada_metadata.html 49.05 KB text/html
glacier_snowCover_tables_alaska-NWcanada.zip 162.33 KB application/zip
glacier_snowCover_rasters_alaska-NWcanada.zip 387.72 MB application/zip

Purpose

This data is used to understand annual variations in glacier accumulation area and annual mass balance, and to quantify the degree of equilibrium of these glaciers with present-day climate. These datasets may also be used as validation for modeled snow cover distribution and glacier mass balance.

Map

Map Preview

Communities

  • Alaska Science Center (ASC)

Tags

Provenance

Data source
Input directly

Additional Information

Identifiers

Type Scheme Key
DOI https://www.sciencebase.gov/vocab/category/item/identifier doi:10.5066/P1QHST6F

Item Actions

View Item as ...

JSON ATOM ISO XML

Save Item as ...

JSON FGDC MODS XML ISO XML

View Item...

Metrics