A new inventory of High Mountain Asia surging glaciers derived from multiple elevation datasets since the 1970s

Glacier surging is an unusual undulation instability of ice flow and complete surging glacier inventories are important for regional mass balance studies and assessing glacier-related hazards. Glacier surge events in High Mountain Asia (HMA) are widely reported. Through the estimated elevation changes from multiple DEMs sources that acquired from 1970s to 2020, and morphologic changes from 1986 to 2021, here we present a new surging glacier inventory across HMA. The inventory has incorporated 890 surging and 336 surge-like glaciers, each glacier is assigned with indicators of surging feature and surge possibility. Compared to previous surging glacier inventory in HMA, our inventory is theoretically more complete because of the much longer observation period. This data repository contains the surging glacier inventory and glacier elevation change maps. The inventory is stored in the format of GeoPackage (.gpkg) and ESRI Shapefile format (.shp), which is represented by glacier polygon (from GAMDAM2) or surface point with geometric attributes. The multi-temporal elevation change maps of identified surging glaciers were divided into 1×1° tiles, storing in the format of GeoTiff(*.tif). Detailed description of the dataset including the file contents and attributes information can be found in the metadata file (README.txt).