Regional Assessments of Glacier Mass Change (RAGMAC) experiment dataset

This repository contains the dataset that was distributed to the participants of the Regional Assessments of Glacier Mass Change (RAGMAC) workinggroup of the International Association of Cryospheric Science (IACS, 2023).

In short, the dataset is divided in 5 study sites: Hintereisferner (Austrian Alps - HEF_AT), Grosser Aletschgletscher (Swiss Alps - ALE_CH), Vestre Svartisen ice cap (Scandes, Norway - VES_NO), Baltoro glacier (Karakoram, Pakistan - BAL_PK), and the Northern Patagonian Icefield (Andes, Chile - NPI_CL).

For each site, we provide series of Digital Elevation Models (DEMs) derived from SRTM, ASTER and TanDEM-X sensors. Additionally, we provide glacier outlines extracted from the Randolph Glacier Inventory version 6, for all glaciers in the study area, and selected glaciers for which participants were required to calculate the geodetic mass balance.

Additionally, we provide the airborne DEMs that were used as reference data to evaluate the spaceborne DEMs. These are available for the cases HEF_AT, ALE_CH and VES_NO, all included in the single zip file “validation_data.zip”.

For details on the dataset, experiment and any reference to this dataset, please refer to the following publication: Piermattei et al. (2024) "Observing glacier elevation changes from spaceborne optical and radar sensors – an inter-comparison experiment using ASTER and TanDEM-X data" The Cryosphere, DOI: 10.5194/egusphere-2023-2309 (to be updated upon final acceptance).

NOTE: As of July 2024, the TanDEM-X DEMs cannot be publicly shared due to license restrictions. We are discussing future opportunities to share the data in a future version of this repository.