IACS logoA new 4-year Working Group (WG) of the International Association of Cryospheric Sciences (IACS) on the “Randolph Glacier Inventory (RGI) and its role in Glacier Monitoring and GLIMS” (https://cryosphericsciences.org/activities/working-groups/rgi-working-group/) has been launched to pursue and expand the work of a similar previous working group (http://www.cryosphericsciences.org/wg_randGlacierInv.html), with new and updated objectives.

The RGI is a globally complete dataset of glacier outlines with a ‘frozen’ time stamp for use primarily in global/regional scale glacier assessments and modeling. Today, it is a centerpiece of glaciological research. The latest version (RGI6.0) was released in 2017. The main goals of this new WG are to work towards updated RGI releases with increased number of attributes, develop and make available a set of user-friendly tools for RGI users to work with RGI data, and work towards full convergence between the RGI and the GLIMS Glacier Database. 

The RGI is a community product: its future development depends on broad involvement! Participation in the Working Group is open; we welcome broad international participation and aim for diversity with regard to gender, geographic spread and career stage. We welcome two levels of WG participation, WG Members and/or WG Contributors:

WG members are expected to contribute actively to the goals of the WG and strategic decisions and to participate in annual WG meetings (mostly held at conferences; remote participation via telecon can be arranged) and possible telecons in between. WG members must be IACS members (https://cryosphericsciences.org/members/membership/).

WG Contributors are all individuals who have contributed or will contribute to any outlines to GLIMS (https://www.glims.org/) that will be used in the next RGI to be released by the end of 2020. All contributors will be part of the RGI Consortium and named and acknowledged in the next RGI release.

If you are interested in joining and contributing to the WG (as Member or Contributor), please contact Fabien Maussion (fabien.maussion @ uibk.ac.at) and Regine Hock (rehock @ alaska.edu), and let us know (latest by 20 February 2020) how you intend to contribute to the goals of the WG and/or for which regions you are able to provide outlines for consideration for the next RGI version (any new outlines must be submitted through GLIMS - a specific call for data will follow). We also welcome any feedback you might have about the RGI and the goals of the WG: we aim to make the RGI as useful as possible for anyone!

For further information see:
https://cryosphericsciences.org/activities/working-groups/rgi-working-group/
https://cryosphericsciences.org