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Acronyms

General definitions

Brokered data set: A dataset that is made available in the Climate Data Store (CDS) but freely available (under given license conditions) from external sources. In the case of the glacier distribution service, the Randolph Glacier Inventory (RGI) is brokered for the CDS from https://glims.org/RGI¹ under a CC-BY 4.0 license.

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Scope of the document

This document is the Target Requirements and Gap Analysis Document (TRGAD) for the glacier distribution service (Global Climate Observing System (GCOS) product: Glacier Area) within the Land Hydrology and Cryosphere (LHC) service. A related document for the glacier change service (GCOS product: Glacier mass change) is available from [RD1]. We here provide users with condensed information on characteristics of the glacier area product, data processing, key product requirements (technical specifications) and major data gaps. The latter refer to data availability and spatial coverage or in terms of scientific research, gaps to enable the current glacier products to be evolved (e.g. faster algorithms) to respond to specified user requirements (e.g. further quality improvements).

Executive summary

The document starts with a short introduction into the nature of glaciers and glaciology, their global distribution, how and by whom their extents are mapped and where the created datasets are stored. This should give the background to better understand why certain points of the data processing and distribution is very different from other Essential Climate Variable (ECV) products. For example, the product format is a shape file that is usually created by a single analyst from manually selected satellite images on a desktop computer by on-screen digitizing [RD2]. Afterwards we provide an overview on the input and auxiliary data, a short description of the retrieval algorithms and a note on the methodology applied for uncertainty estimation. Second, the target requirements according to international organisations such as the Global Climate Observing System (GCOS) and the scientific community are presented. For the former, we explain how the various entries have to be interpreted, as this is not always fully clear. For the latter (community needs) we explain how they are linked to the former and what the special challenges are when creating the glacier area (or outline) product. Third, the gap analysis provides an overview on the historic development regarding satellite data (input) and glacier outlines (output) to better understand the data gaps and needs as well as the further requirements. The latter have a focus on possible further development of algorithms, uncertainties and CDS products. We close with a description of scientific research needs and opportunities for a further data exploitation from optical sensors.

Product overview

Introduction

Glaciers originate from compressed snow and can thus be found where the annual snow fall survives summer melt. This requires low temperatures, sufficient solid precipitation and a not too steep region where snowfall can accumulate. Glaciers are thus found in mountain regions all over the world, from the equator to the poles. The warmer it gets, the higher their elevations, the larger the precipitation amounts, the larger they can grow. Thereby, glaciers can flow down to low elevations when the higher mass loss here is compensated by an increased mass flux due to higher precipitation. When temperatures increase, glaciers retreat to higher elevations where it is cooler and mass loss is smaller. If the mountain range is no longer high enough to keep snow over a full year, glaciers will ultimately disappear. The presence of glaciers is thus telling us something about the climatic conditions in a region and the changes of their extent about the changes of climate. If glacier mass loss due to melt of ice and snow during summer is the same as the mass gain due to snowfall in winter, their mass balance over a year is zero. Also in this case they contribute to run-off in summer and thus provide water when it is most needed, e.g. for irrigation. When mass loss over a year is higher than the mass gained, their mass balance is negative and the excess melt contribute to global sea-level rise. For these and several other reasons (e.g. natural hazards, tourism) it is important to know where glaciers are located, how large they are and much water they store (volume) and release (mass balance), and how they change over time.

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Accordingly, the workload to create a glacier inventory for a larger region is very high and usually only done as part of science projects for small regions. A key reason for the latter point was that Landsat data were commercially distributed for a long time and covering a larger region was very expensive. To date, data access is free and open, but the workload for the analyst remains. Apart from the Copernicus Climate Change Service (C3S), there is no funding available for repeat large-scale glacier mapping and the interested community has organized themselves to get the datasets produced according to some data standards and distributed in a free and open repository, the Global Land Ice Measurements from Space (GLIMS) glacier database (see https://glims.org). This database holds basically everything that has been submitted by the analysts, independent of date, region or number of glaciers. Accordingly, the quality of the outlines varies and the process of filling the database was very slow. Via a special effort for the Fifth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC AR5), the scientific community created the first globally near-complete inventory with the name Randolph Glacier Inventory (RGI) in 2012 (Pfeffer et al. 2014). The latest version 6 of the RGI was published in 2017 and created by manually selecting the best datasets from the GLIMS database. The C3S glacier distribution service contributes to the GLIMS database with a targeted data production by creating spatio-temporal subsets of glacier outlines (so called Intermediate Climate Data Records or ICDRs) for regions of demand and future versions of the RGI. Only the latest version of the RGI is brokered as a CDR for the CDS, the subsets created by C3S (the ICDRs) are available from GLIMS. The descriptions provided here relate to the work done by the glacier distribution service within the C3S project, but are also valid for other scientists providing data to GLIMS.

Input and auxiliary data

The dataset that is provided for the Climate Data Store (CDS) by the glacier distribution service is the RGI that is brokered from the GLIMS glacier database² and consists of glacier outlines with associated attribute information in shape file format and a csv file providing the hypsometry of each glacier. The dataset covers all glaciers in the world and has been compiled from regional-scale datasets provided by the scientific community to the GLIMS database³ at the National Snow and Ice Data Center (NSIDC). Whereas GLIMS is multi-temporal and may contain outlines of the same glacier from several points in time, the RGI is a snapshot and includes only one outline per glacier. The datasets in the RGI have been derived by the respective data providers from several sources, for example satellite images, aerial photographs or digitized topographic maps (Pfeffer et al. 2014). We here refer to the methods applied by C3S [RD3] and the European Space Agency (ESA) project Glaciers_cci [RD4].

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Retrieval algorithm

The core of the glacier mapping algorithm as applied by C3S is the calculation of a spectral band ratio using a visible and shortwave infrared (SWIR) band and a (manually selected) threshold value to classify the resulting ratio image into a class 'glacier' and a class 'other'. The method is applied unchanged since more than 25 years and does not have a version number or a specific name, but we refer to it as the 'band ratio method'. Further details of the largely manual post-processing are provided in Section 3.2.

Uncertainty estimation

The differences in interpretation described in Section 1.1 also limit the possibilities for a rigorous quality assessment of the generated products. In general, the interpretation differences are much larger than those introduced by the method applied and often also larger than changes over a 5-10 year period. Another problem is that the possibility for quality assessment and validation, depends on the availability of appropriate higher resolution datasets (e.g. aerial photography). However, these are often not appropriate for a comparison as they are generally obtained at a different date. For example, a comparison is of limited value when snow conditions are different in the high-resolution data. Unfortunately, such datasets are in general very expensive and come with a different geolocation (as a different DEM is used for orthorectification). A current workaround is the use of so-called web map-services that might provide, by chance, very high-resolution images that are comparable and can then be used for a quality assessment (e.g. Andreassen et al. 2022).

In principle, all glacier outlines are quality checked by the analyst before submission to the GLIMS database. This glacier-by-glacier quality control is required as the automated methods do not map glacier ice under debris cover or partly miss ice in shadow (omission errors), but map turbid lakes or ice bergs as glaciers (commission errors). These had to be corrected/removed before an outline has acceptable quality (Figure 1), i.e. reaching the GCOS uncertainty specifications described in Section 2.1. A critical point for change assessment is to determine if an observed change is significant, i.e. larger than the uncertainty. This requires determination of a quantitative uncertainty measure (see Section 3.3 for related methods). 

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Figure 1. Overlay of glacier outlines that have been classified automatically (yellow), manually added (red), and removed (white) for the Oberaarglacier (OA) and the heavily debris-covered tongue of Unteraarglacier (UA). Glacier ice in shadow is correctly mapped in this region. Image width is 14.1 km, North is up.

User Requirements

International documents (GCOS, IGOS)

The requirements for the area product of the ECV 'Glaciers' have been described in documents from international organizations. Two of these documents provide the foundation of the work performed in C3S. First, GCOS (2006) identifies the glacier area product under Product T.2.1:

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The second document of major importance for C3S work is the Cryosphere Theme Report of the Integrated Global Observing Strategy (IGOS 2007). This document contains in its Appendix B.6 a detailed overview of technical requirements for glacier products. The related table has been widely used in other documents, is still valid and reproduced here as Table 1.

Table 1: Target requirements for the ECV Glaciers according to IGOS (2007). Abbreviations are as follows: C: Current Capability, T: Threshold Requirement (Minimum necessary), O: Objective Requirement (Target), L: Low end of measurement range, U: Unit, H: High end of measurement range, V: Value, mo: month, yr: year.

The entries in Table 1 require some explanation. Firstly, the values listed for measurement range and accuracy are valid and still reflect the current target requirements. Spatial (5 m) and temporal (30 y) resolution for ‘Area’ in the row airborne refers to the accuracy and repetition frequency of glacier inventories derived from aerial photography (incl. manual digitization of outlines) at that time. This applies similarly to the rows ‘Landsat etc.’ and ‘Hi-res optical’. However, for the latter we are now in the 5 to 10 m range (with Pleiades and Sentinel-2) and the target requirement has already been surpassed. The ‘1 yr’ temporal resolution refers to what would be theoretically possible, but makes little sense in regard to the tiered observing strategy established by the Global Terrestrial Network for Glaciers (GTN-G), as glacier response times are generally a few decades and annual fluctuations are measured as terminus changes in the field (Haeberli et al. 2000). To be significant, glaciers have to change the position of their terminus by about 30 m (with Sentinel-2), which is at current annual glacier retreat rates in the Alps typically achieved after about 5 years.

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In the GCOS Implementation Plan from 2016 (GCOS 2016) the requirements for the three products Glacier area, elevation and mass change have been updated to overcome the potential confusion of glacier elevation changes with glacier topography (Table 2). It has also been clarified that uncertainties for glacier area should not exceed 5% to fulfil GCOS requirements. This means that manual editing has to be applied to outlines of glaciers under seasonal snow or debris cover, connected to lakes or to glaciers with parts of their area in shadow (see Figure 1). The latest GCOS report is listing the requirements for the glacier area product in Section 8.2.1 of its Supplement (GCOS 2022) in more detail. This new overview includes a notes section for clarifications along with threshold values that have been adjusted to current sensor capabilities (Table 3). The previous confusion with the temporal resolution has been clarified and product uncertainties are now given in dependence of the spatial resolution of the sensor. Whereas this dependence and the values are largely correct, it has to be noted that uncertainties do more depend on glacier size, image conditions (e.g. seasonal snow) and debris cover (which might cover large parts of a glacier). Overall, threshold values only changed slightly and their description improved over time.

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Table 3: Target requirements for glaciers according to GCOS (2022). [1] Abbreviations are as follows: G: Goal (ideal requirement above which further improvements are not necessary), B: Breakthrough (Intermediate level, if achieved, would result in a significant improvement for the targeted application), T: Threshold (minimum requirement).

Community needs

In agreement with Product T.3.1 of GCOS (2011), the basic need of a very large user community is a globally complete glacier inventory with sufficient quality in a vector format. The related information about glacier location and extents (i.e. the glacier area product) is required for a wide range of applications and calculations serving societal needs. These range from hydro-power production at a local scale, to river-runoff at a regional scale, to determination of glacier contribution to sea level at a global scale. It includes scientific applications such as ice thickness estimation, modelling of past and future glacier extents, climate change impact assessment and improved process understanding from observed changes. Moreover, all glacier-specific calculations (e.g. geodetic mass balance, flow velocities, end of summer snow cover) need glacier boundaries as a basic input dataset (Berthier et al. 2023). This is not only required to spatially constrain the calculations and derive a glacier-specific mean value, but also for uncertainty assessment of these products (e.g. the related calculations need to know where the 'stable terrain' off glaciers is) or even basic pre-processing steps such as DEM co-registration (Nuth and Kääb 2011). Finally, early warnings related to hazards (e.g. glacier lake outburst floods) or potential flooding (due to combined snow and ice melt in late spring) from governmental agencies and national hydrological services require precise information of glacier extents with a given time stamp. The dataset in the CDS (the RGI) is serving these needs.

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In an ideal case, glacier outlines would be compiled globally each year to combine them with other datasets and get the most precise modelling results. This user need cannot be accomplished as the workload for a single inventory is too high and appropriate satellite imagery with good mapping conditions (e.g. free of clouds and snow off glaciers) are usually only available over much longer time scales, e.g. every 5-10 years. Luckily and as mentioned above, glaciers do (in most regions of the world) not change that fast, i.e. the outlines obtained in a specific year might be used for a time period of ±5 years (depending on the region and area change rates) without introducing too large errors in the derived products. The uncertainty in their extents is often higher than their changes over a 5 to 10-year period, in particular when they are debris covered or frequent seasonal snow is hiding the true glacier perimeter. This might be different when working on a more regional or local scale, but for such applications higher quality datasets are often available or can be obtained. So the desire for an annual update of the global glacier inventory cannot be fulfilled, but the strategy of an update every one or two decades (Haeberli et al. 2000) is in line with GCOS requirements (Table 3). 

Similarly, the community need for a consistent interpretation of glacier extents has not yet been achieved as glacier outlines are created by a globally distributed community and the interpretation of what a glacier is and which parts belong to it can depend on sensor resolution, the application and the experience of the analyst. Most glacier outlines are created by science projects and these might have different needs than other applications. For example, for water resources assessment a science project might not be interested in mapping the steep and thus thin upper part of glaciers, or glaciers smaller than a certain size are not mapped because the region is dominated by huge glaciers and the focus is on the sea level contribution of its glaciers. Moreover, there is room for interpretation and related differences might not be right or wrong, i.e. both can be correct despite being different. Due to the variability in interpretation of glacier extents by different analysts, it is not advisable to use other datasets for change assessment. In principle, the differences can be as large as real glacier changes over a longer period, in particular when satellite scenes with adverse snow conditions were used. Such issues are addressed by C3S in cooperation with data providers.  

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Gap Analysis

Description of past, current and future satellite coverage

Historic Development

For glacier outlines derived from optical satellite data (Landsat type) the possibilities for data retrieval have constantly improved over the past decades. However, there has been one major break point that changed everything: the opening of the Landsat archive in 2008 (Woodcock et al. 2008, Wulder et al. 2012). Without this step it would have never been possible to utilize the vast archive of images (>3 million scenes) for global-scale applications, in our case the global glacier inventory (Pfeffer et al. 2014). However, it has to be mentioned that the glaciological community found a way to have free access to multi-spectral (15 m) ASTER data (a sensor of the Terra spacecraft launched in 1999) by registering to the GLIMS initiative and establishing GLIMS as a major science application of the ASTER data acquisition strategy (Raup et al. 2000). With the GLIMS database in place and algorithms for automated glacier mapping being developed, population of the database with glacier outlines slowly started. There were three bottlenecks in the earlier days of glacier mapping:

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Spectral and spatial properties

Automated glacier mapping (clean ice) is largely based on calculating a simple band ratio (e.g. red/SWIR) and applying a threshold to create a binary glacier map that can be converted to glacier outlines using a raster to vector conversion (e.g. Hall et al. 1988, Bayr et al. 1994, Paul et al. 2002). This works well, as spectral properties of ice and snow are very different in the SWIR (where both have a very low reflectance) compared to the red or Near Infrared (NIR). Owing to the windows of atmospheric transmission and physical principles, the spectral ranges of the required spectral bands are very similar on all optical sensors that can be used for glacier mapping (Table 4). Accordingly, the methods developed for automated glacier mapping with Landsat TM can also be used for Landsat ETM+ and OLI, Terra ASTER, Satellites Pour l'Observation de la Terre (SPOT) High Resolution Visible (HRV), Sentinel-2 MSI and several others. The only requirement is a spectral band in the SWIR, otherwise only manual delineation of outlines can be applied. This, is, for example, required for all of the very-high resolution sensors such as Quickbird, GeoEye, Kartosat or Worldview as well as for aerial images.

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All sensors have sun-synchronous orbits with acquisition times around 10:30 am local, a compromise between solar elevation (casting larger shadows when low) and cloud development (often starting before noon in mountain regions). Apart from the global acquisition strategy, seasonal snow at the end of the ablation (or dry) period and clouds are main obstacles to produce glacier outlines regularly. In some regions it can take more than 10 or 15 years before the next useful acquisition is made (Paul et al. 2011). For this reason, it is required to analyse new acquisitions each year and process them as required.

Global coverage

Apart from clouds and seasonal snow, global-scale glacier mapping is also limited by the acquisition strategy. Whereas this has changed today as Landsat 8 and Sentinel-2 acquire images more or less continuously, the limited on-board storage capacity of Landsat TM/ETM+ resulted in a pattern of acquisitions around ground receiving stations (Goward et al. 2006). As the network of these stations was successively extended, more and more regions where covered (Figure 2). During the commercial phase of Landsat acquisitions in the 1990s, images were only acquired upon request in several regions, so that large regions are not covered. In consequence, nearly all glaciers in High Mountain Asia are not covered before 1988 (Figure 2).

A second consequence of the distributed acquisition is that the (since 2008) freely available orthorectified product (L1T) was constrained to the holdings in the United States Geological Survey (USGS) archives at LPDAAC. Scenes outside the US were strongly underrepresented, and it was with some luck to have useful acquisitions over a particular region already covered. The still on-going Landsat Global Archive Consolidation (LGAC) will transfer all Landsat scenes from around the world into the USGS archive and process them to the L1T standard (Wulder et al. 2016). For this reason, global coverage is constantly increasing and new possibilities of product generation emerge. This is also true for cloud processing applications (e.g. in Google Earth Engine) or machine learning, as the related data clouds will include a copy of all Landsat and Sentinel-1/2 scenes. 

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Overall, the outlook for satellite-based glacier mapping and monitoring is very promising. The possibilities in the coming years might revolutionize our understanding of glaciers as the now available sensors can support several glaciological investigations (e.g. flow velocities and snow lines) with unprecedented spatial and temporal resolution (e.g. Paul et al. 2022).

Development of processing algorithms

The core of the glacier mapping algorithm is the calculation of a spectral band ratio from a visible and shortwave infrared (SWIR) band and a (manually selected) threshold value to classify the resulting ratio image into a class ‘glacier’ and a class ‘other’, usually represented by the values 1 and 0. Threshold selection is an optimization process that aims to reduce the workload for manual corrections of the resulting outlines. As debris cover and water surfaces have to be manually edited anyway, the focus is on obtaining the best possible result in regions with ice in shadow, where the threshold is most sensitive. For specific sensors or conditions, additional thresholds are required to improve the results, e.g. in the blue band (see Paul et al. 2016). The resulting binary raster map might be filtered for noise reduction (e.g. if many small snow patches are present and should be removed) and is then converted to vector format. Further details about the methods applied can be found in the ATBDs of C3S [RD3] and Glaciers_cci [RD4]. All editing takes place in the vector domain, using contrast-enhanced band combinations of the original satellite image in the background. The edited final glacier outlines are intersected by drainage divides (that are obtained by a semi-automated flow-shed algorithm and have to be edited as well) to separate glacier complexes into individual glaciers. Finally, topographic information is derived for each glacier from the DEM using zone statistics (in short, the glacier outlines define a zone for which statistical values from an underlying DEM are calculated).

We follow the further development of processing algorithms closely. They will be performed as part of the Glaciers_CCI+ project and by the science community. In the case improvements appear in the literature, we will test if the method is sufficiently robust for the products we wish to provide for C3S2. Apart from this, the current method to map debris-free glacier ice is so simple and accurate, that a ‘better’ method is not expected to appear any time soon. This is different for the still evolving approaches to map debris-covered glaciers or applications with Google Earth Engine using cloud processing and machine learning, both reducing work load when large regions and/or many scenes are to be covered. As mentioned above, the requirement to manually correct debris-covered glacier parts results in inconsistency in the interpretation among different analysts. This reduces the possibility for change assessment when datasets are provided by different analysts. Harmonizing the interpretation of glacier outlines is, however, more an issue of post-processing rather than the algorithm itself. Thereby, the resulting uncertainty strongly depends on the regional glacier characteristics and the usefulness of glacier outlines for change assessment has to be clarified case-by-case. For the datasets provided by the CDS the impact of the inconsistency in interpretation is small, as the RGI only includes one outline from one point in time for each glacier.

Methods for estimating uncertainties

As real validation of glacier areas is only performed occasionally (in general due to missing reference datasets), a range of measures for uncertainty assessment have been developed which do not require reference data. The goal is to keep the uncertainty of the derived glacier areas at <5% to comply with GCOS requirements (see Section 2.1). Whereas this is generally possible, one has to consider that uncertainty strongly increases towards smaller glaciers. For glaciers <1 km² uncertainty is usually larger than 5% and vice versa. But uncertainty also depends on the amount of manual corrections to be performed, i.e. is larger when many debris-covered glaciers have to be corrected. Which of the methods for uncertainty assessment is or are applied is thus also depending on the regional glacier characteristics and one method might be favoured over another one. In Table 5, we briefly summarize the main methods sorted by level, which is related to the workload required to perform the related calculations. A full description can be found in the Uncertainty Characterization Report of the Glaciers_cci project (Glaciers_cci, 2016).

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As a note to L3, also the outlines derived from very high-resolution imagery have an uncertainty that should be assessed. The major shortcoming of current studies is that uncertainty estimates are sometimes not applied. In C3S we use measure Nr. 1 (L0a) to identify regions in the RGI that have poor quality and need to be improved (see Section 3.4). For the datasets created within the project we will mostly use measures Nr. 3 and 4 (L1 and L2) to determine product uncertainty. In selected regions we will also apply Nr. 5 (L3) to obtain an estimate of product accuracy. The related values will be reported as part of the Product Quality Assessment Report [RD5].

Opportunities to improve quality and fitness-for-purpose of the CDRs

As mentioned above, several regions have already been improved by the C3S team for RGI7. In Figure 3 we provide two examples of the improved datasets. In most cases we improved both glacier outlines and drainage divides. For Ellesmere Island these are based on watersheds derived from the ArcticDEM and for Baffin Island we additionally used flow velocity fields to decide where ice divides have to be. 

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Furthermore, the need for a global glacier inventory in raster format has been identified as an urgent need for the CDS. The technical details (e.g. spatial resolution) of this dataset will be determined in the course of the project. 

Scientific Research needs

To keep the work in C3S2 distinct from ESA's Climate Change Initiative (CCI), scientific research needs (e.g. related to algorithm development, uncertainty characterization, or key science questions) will be addressed as part of the CCI. However, assessment of glacier area changes over large regions will primarily be performed in C3S2.

Opportunities from exploiting the Sentinels and any other relevant satellite

As mentioned above, the time series of Sentinel-2 data will primarily be used to create new glacier inventories over the most recent time period. They will be submitted to the GLIMS glacier database and might potentially be considered by the IACS working group on the RGI for a currently planned new version of the RGI that will contain glacier outlines over a most recent time period, likely the Landsat 8/9 and Sentinel-2A/B period. Data production will be tailored to the requirements for this new RGI version. With the current re-processing of all datasets, the former geolocation differences between Landsat and Sentinel should no longer occur. We will analyse this in C3S for regions where both datasets will be processed.

References

Andreassen, L.M., Nagy, T., Kjøllmoen, B., Leigh, J.R. (2022): An inventory of Norway's glaciers and ice-marginal lakes from 2018–19 Sentinel-2 data. Journal of Glaciology, 68 (272), 1085-1106.

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