Randolph Glacier Inventory - A Dataset of Global Glacier Outlines, Version 7

The Randolph Glacier Inventory (RGI) is a global set of glacier outlines intended as a snapshot of the world’s glaciers outside of ice sheets. It provides a single outline for each glacier from approximately the year 2000, as well as a set of attributes and other relevant auxiliary information. Glacier outlines are distributed as Shapefiles. Hypsometric data and attributes (CSV files) and metadata (json) are also available. All RGI data are packaged both globally and by region (as defined by the Global Terrestrial Network for Glaciers (GTN-G) Glacier Regions).

The RGI is not suitable for measuring glacier-by-glacier rates of area change. However, it can be used to estimate glacier volumes; rates of elevation change at regional and global scales; and glacier responses to climatic forcing.

RGI version 7.0 was developed by the “Working Group on the Randolph Glacier Inventory (RGI) and its role in future glacier monitoring” of the International Association of Cryospheric Sciences (IACS). The glaciological community contributes glacier mapping data to the Global Land Ice Measurements from Space (GLIMS) database. A subset of the glacier outlines in GLIMS are then extracted and reprocessed to produce the RGI.

See the RGI documentation under \"User Guide\" (below) for more information.