Loibl, David; Grünberg, Inge; Richter, Niklas: Time series of transient snowline altitudes for High Mountain Asia, 1985–2021, derived from remote sensing data using Google Earth Engine [dataset]. PANGAEA, https://doi.pangaea.de/10.1594/PANGAEA.953619 (dataset in review)

Here we present a dataset of Transient Snowline Altitude (TSLA) measurements for glaciers in High Mountain Asia (HMA) based on Landsat satellite imagery and digital elevation model data. The data were obtained using the MountAiN glacier Transient snowline Retrieval Algorithm (MANTRA), a Google Earth Engine tool to measure the average altitude of the snow-ice boundary. Each MANTRA result consists of reference data (e.g. Landsat scene, date, glacier ID), relevant topographic metrics (glacier area, minimum and maximum elevation of the glacier), results of the surface material classification (areas covered by ice, snow, debris and clouds), summary statistics of the TSLA measurement, and quality metrics (cloud cover close to snow-ice boundary, class coverage). For the dataset presented here, we applied MANTRA to all glaciers in HMA with an area larger than 0.5 km² (ca. 28,500 based on Randolph Glacier Inventory v6 glacier outlines). After filtering and postprocessing, the dataset comprises ca. 9.66 million TSLA measurements with an average of 341 ± 160 measurements per glacier, covering the time span 1985 to 2021.

Time series of Transient Snowline Altitude (TSLA) metrics for glaciers in High Mountain Asia, 1986 to 2021.

The file is in NetCDF format, with the date of the Landsat measurement (LS_DATE) as index.

Individual glacier are identified through Randolph Glacier Inventory v6 IDs (RGI_ID).

The recommended metric to use for analyses is the median elevation of the detected TSLA range (TSLrange_median_masl).