DebDab: A database of supraglacial debris thickness and physical properties

DebDab: A database of supraglacial debris thickness and physical properties

Debdab is a database of  measured and reported physical properties and thickness of supraglacial debris that we call DebDab and that is openly available and open to community submissions. The majority of the database (90%) is compiled from 172 sources in the literature, and the remaining 10% has not been published before. DebDab contains 8,286 data entries for supraglacial debris thickness, of which 1,852 entries also include sub-debris ablation rates, 167 data entries of thermal conductivity of debris, 157 of aerodynamic surface roughness length, 77 of debris albedo, 56 of debris emissivity and 37 of debris porosity. The data are distributed over 83 glaciers in 13 regions in the Global Terrestrial Network for Glaciers. 

This is an initial version of the dataset for submission of a "Data descriptor" manuscript for publication in the scientific journal "Earth System Science Data (ESSD)" from Copernicus Publications. 

The initial v1 submission consists of the following files:(Note there are two versions on Zenodo because of corrections and new files added after submission to Earth System Science Data, but the database is still v1) 

DebDab_v1.xlsx : The actual DebDab database. Organised in spreadsheet tabs for each of the debris properties. 

Readme files (.txt) for each of the debris property tabs, describing all the fields in each tab. 

Templates (.xlsx) for data submission for each of the debris properties in DebDab. The procedure for data submissions to DebDab and for updating the dataset will be detailed after the potential publication in the journal ESSD and in agreement with the journal policy and guidelines. 

DebDab_data_sources.pdf: List of DebDab sources from published literature. (to be uploaded in v2)

DebDab_data_sources.bib: BibTeX list of DebDab sources from published literature. (to be uploaded in v2)

Data_descriptor_manuscript_figures.m: code to generate the figures for data descriptor manuscript on ESSD (to be uploaded in v2).

outlines_hypsometry_debdab_glaciers.mat: A file necessary to plot Figures 6, A4 and A5 in the data descriptor manuscript on ESSD. The file contains the hypsommetry (elevation distribution) of all glaciers in DebDab, according to the RGI6.0 outlines and an ALOS DEM 30 m resolution (to be uploaded in v2).

The data descriptor manuscript has been submitted and the corresponding DOI will be published here as soon as soon as the paper is in preprint/open review stage. 

DebDab is open to new data submissions, and therefore future data submissions of previously unpublished data to DebDab will entail co-authorship on the DebDab database on Zenodo. 

Furthermore, authors from published literature that check, verify or update their data on DebDab will become co-authors on the DebDab database on Zenodo.

Important note on citations: DebDab data users should cite the data descriptor manuscript (Fontrodona-Bach et al. 2024), the DebDab zenodo repository(Groeneveld et al., 2024), and the original data sources when using the database, given that DebDab is mostlya compilation of previously published data. To facilitate the citations of original data sources, each of the data entries in DebDab contains the correspondingoriginal reference and corresponding DOI.