Historical glacier outlines from digitized topographic maps of the Swiss Alps

Freudiger, Daphné; Mennekes, David; Seibert, Jan; Weiler, Markus

doi:https://doi.org/10.5194/essd-10-805-2018

Articles | Volume 10, issue 2

https://doi.org/10.5194/essd-10-805-2018

© Author(s) 2018. This work is distributed under
the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License.

https://doi.org/10.5194/essd-10-805-2018

© Author(s) 2018. This work is distributed under
the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License.

Articles | Volume 10, issue 2

20 Apr 2018

| 20 Apr 2018

Historical glacier outlines from digitized topographic maps of the Swiss Alps

Daphné Freudiger, David Mennekes, Jan Seibert, and Markus Weiler

Data sets

Historical glacier outlines from digitized topographic maps of the Swiss Alps for the years ca. 1900 and ca. 1935 D. Freudiger, D. Mennekes, J. Seibert, and M. Weiler https://doi.org/10.6094/UNIFR/12874

Short summary

To understand glacier changes in the Swiss Alps at the large scale, long-term datasets are needed. To fill the gap between the existing glacier inventories of the Swiss Alps between 1850 and 1973, we digitized glacier outlines from topographic historical maps of Switzerland for the time periods ca. 1900 and ca. 1935. We found that > 88 % of the digitized glacier area was plausible compared to four inventories. The presented dataset is therefore valuable information for long-term glacier studies.