Supplementary Data for "Progressively smaller outbursts despite worldwide growth of glacier lakes"

This respository contains the source data for the study for Progressively smaller outbursts despite worldwide growth of glacier lakes by Georg Veh and co-authors.

We investigate trends in the size of glacier lake outburst floods (GLOFs) in 13 mountain regions on 4 continents between 1990 and 2023. We distinguish between moraine-and bedrock-dammed lakes on the one hand, and ice-dammed and supraglacial lakes on the other hand. We use Bayesian hierarchical models, implemented in the package brms in in the statistical programming software R to model temporal trends in the lake area prior to failure on different geographical levels. More information on these data, including detailed scripts to process them, are available at https://github.com/geveh/GLOFsize.

We provide the following data:

1 The GLOF database

glofdatabase_2024_10_21.ods: OpenOffice table with all reported GLOFs. Compiliation as of Oct 21, 2024.

all_glofs_tibble.RDS: R-object of all reported GLOFs in the global GLOF database; data are not trimmed to the period 1990-2023.

la_sf.RDS: R-object containing all GLOFs with mapped lake areas before the outburst in the period 1990-2023.

reported_GLOFs.rds: R-object containing a table of reported GLOFs in the period 1990-2023 with machine readable names of glaciers and lakes.

reported_GLOFs_with_geometry.rds: R-object containing a simple features (sf) object of reported GLOFs in the period 1990-2023 with machine readable names of glaciers and lakes.

For a description of the parameters in these tables and R-objects, please visit: Lützow, N., Veh, G., & Korup, O. (2023). A global database of historic glacier lake outburst floods. Earth Syst. Sci. Data, 15, 2983–3000, https://doi.org/10.5194/essd-15-2983-2023

The GLOF database, V4.1 is also available at: http://glofs.geoecology.uni-potsdam.de/

2 Regional extents of study regions

rgiO2_dissolved_outlines.shp: Merged outlines of the RGI O2 according to the 13 study regions in ESRI shapefile format 

glacier_buffers_split_by_O2_no_fid_correct_FULLNAME_2.gpkg: Regional 5-km buffers around glaciers with overlapping buffers removed in geopackage format.

3 Estimated glacier thickness data

RGI-wide_composites_stats_GV.txt: Textfile of estimated glacier thickness for every glacier in the Randolph Glacier Inventory V6.0. Data were made available from Daniel Farinotti (personal communication).

reg_invs_bind.rds: A table of all glaciers in the 13 study region that had an estimate of average ice thickness.

4 Glacier lake data

We do not share raw data from previously lake inventories because they might be subject to different licenses. Please contact the authors directly if you would like to access these data. Here we share

Glacier_lakes_global.ods: OpenOffice spreadsheet of previously published glacier lake inventories, including reference to the underlying study, year, and satellite image used to map glacier lakes.

lakes_gt_1km.gpkg: A geopackage of all lakes >1km² as of 2015 or later, manually labelled with descriptors of their geometric properties obtained from interpreting high-resolution satellite images.