Inventory of glaciers and perennial snowfields of the conterminous USA

Abstract

Abstract. This report summarizes an updated inventory of glaciers and perennial snowfields of the conterminous United States. The inventory is based on interpretation of mostly aerial imagery provided by the National Agricultural I magery Program, US Department of Agriculture, with some satellite imagery in places where aerial imagery was not suitable. The inventory includes all perennial snow and ice features ≥ 0.01 km2. Due to aerial survey schedules and seasonal snow cover, imageries acquired over a number of years were required. The earliest date is 2013 and the latest is 2020, but more than 73 % of the outlines were acquired from 2015 imagery. The inventory is compiled as shapefiles within a geographic information system that includes feature classification, area, and location. The inventory identified 1331 (366.52 ± 14.34 km2) glaciers, 1176 (31.01 ± 9.30 km2) perennial snowfields, and 35 (3.57 km2 ± no uncertainty) buried-ice features. The data including both the shapefiles and tabulated results are publicly available at https://doi.org/10.15760/geology-data.03 (Fountain and Glenn, 2022).

Brief communication: Recent estimates of glacier mass loss for western North America from laser altimetry

“…Excluded elevation change values exceeded elevation change rates of −20 or 20 m yr −1 , since we assumed that these signals exceed the range of what is physically attributable to glacier processes. To our knowledge, we know of no glaciers in western North America that have experienced surging or advance over the past 2 decades (Bevington and Menounos, 2022;Fountain et al, 2023).…”