The GTN-G monitoring strategy is designed to provide quantitative and comprehensive information in connection with questions about process understanding, change detection, model validation and environmental impacts in an interdisciplinary knowledge transfer to the scientific community as well as to policymakers, the media and the public. In order to link scientific process studies at the one hand with global coverage by satellite imagery and digital terrain information at the other hand, GTN-G provides observations at the following levels:

• extensive glacier mass balance and flow studies within major climatic zones for improved process understanding and calibration of numerical models;
• determination of glacier mass balance using cost-saving methodologies within major mountain systems in order to assess the regional variability;
• long-term observations of glacier length change data and remotely sensed volume changes for large glacier samples within major mountain ranges for assessing the representativeness of mass balance measurements;
• glacier inventories repeated at time intervals of a few decades by using remotely sensed data.

This multi-level monitoring system across environmental gradients provides the basic datasets required for integrative studies and assessments of the distribution and changes of glaciers and ice caps by combining in-situ, remote sensing, and numerical modeling components. More…