More dynamic than expected: an updated survey of surging glaciers in the Pamir

Goerlich, Franz; Bolch, Tobias; Paul, Frank

doi:https://doi.org/10.5194/essd-12-3161-2020

Articles | Volume 12, issue 4

Earth Syst. Sci. Data, 12, 3161–3176, 2020

https://doi.org/10.5194/essd-12-3161-2020

© Author(s) 2020. This work is distributed under
the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License.

Earth Syst. Sci. Data, 12, 3161–3176, 2020

https://doi.org/10.5194/essd-12-3161-2020

© Author(s) 2020. This work is distributed under
the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License.

Articles | Volume 12, issue 4

Data description paper 03 Dec 2020

Data description paper | 03 Dec 2020

More dynamic than expected: an updated survey of surging glaciers in the Pamir

Franz Goerlich et al.

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Final revised paper (published on 03 Dec 2020)
Supplement to the final revised paper
Preprint (discussion started on 16 Apr 2020)
Supplement to the preprint

Interactive discussion

Status: closed

AC: Author comment | RC: Referee comment | SC: Short comment | EC: Editor comment

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RC1: 'Review', Anonymous Referee #1, 20 May 2020
- AC1: 'Reply to Reviewer Comment #1', Franz Goerlich, 30 Jul 2020
RC2: 'Comment on "More dynamic thane xpected: An updated survey of surging glaciersin the Pamir"', Anonymous Referee #2, 10 Jun 2020
- AC2: 'Reply to Reviewer Comment #2', Franz Goerlich, 30 Jul 2020
EC1: 'please answer the referee comments in the public discussion', Kirsten Elger, 11 Jun 2020

Peer-review completion

AR: Author's response | RR: Referee report | ED: Editor decision

AR by Franz Goerlich on behalf of the Authors (30 Jul 2020) Author's response Manuscript

ED: Referee Nomination & Report Request started (10 Aug 2020) by Kirsten Elger

RR by Anonymous Referee #1 (19 Aug 2020)

RR by Anonymous Referee #2 (25 Aug 2020)

Suggestions for revision or reasons for rejection

The authors revised the manuscript thoroughly considering almost all comments and thereby improved the coherence of the paper.
Whether the inconsistencies in the data set itself have been corrected cannot be judged because the new version has not been provided.
Therefore, I include my comments reagrding the original version of the data set and strongly recommend checking the data base.
Data file GI-3min: I suggest to order the columns dist_class, dur_class srg_type and tongue in the same order as in the srg_code. Srg_type=2 (internal) and dist_class>0 should not be possible, but there are many occurences. I still have problems understanding srg_duration: There is one glacier (OBJECTID=10) with srg_dur=300. Is this a typo? Comparing glaciers 2 and 3, both starting in 1988, one has dur_class=0 while the other one has dur_class=3. And for Bivachny, why is srg_dur_y=7 and dur_class=2 when both mapped surges were 2 years long?

Some minor suggestions regarding the text follow below:
l. 27 "has recently received"
l. 78 Is "e.g." correct here?
l. 116 Better put height directlly behind station name.
l. 122 "so far considered as not surging": Why so far? Do you mean surging or surge type here?
l. 136 Now the Landsat list is the second table, but has no table caption. Should it be called S2 now?
l. 318 Add meaning of duration=0. Maybe I missed it, but how do you assign duration and distance for multiple surges with differing properties?
l. 363 Replace "almost the same area than" with "about the same area as", because almost implies smaller than.
l. 377 Change "mean elevation" to "median elevation" both times.
l. 416 There is an inconsistency: In the text you state: "For both graphs it has to be considered that the first period is including all glaciers". But in the caption of Fig 13 you say: "The “88-89” label in a) includes only glaciers that started surging in 1989".
l. 422 Check which bars are black and which grey.
l. 435 In fact, the 18% ONLY connect to another glacier in the maximum extent. The rest should be a tributary.
l. 436 Compare the numbers to the ones in the table (176 vs. 169).
l. 439 Check numbers.
l. 444 Close parenthesis.
Table 4 Check again the statement which surges are not listed. The ones with distance 0 should be the internal surging ones. But in the GI-3min there are also glaciers with dur_class=0, so the total number for duration classes 1-3 should not be 198.
Fig 11 Make sure that "(a)" is visible.

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ED: Publish subject to minor revisions (review by editor) (01 Sep 2020) by Kirsten Elger

AR by Anna Wenzel on behalf of the Authors (09 Oct 2020) Author's response

ED: Publish subject to technical corrections (13 Oct 2020) by Kirsten Elger

Post-review adjustments

AA: Author's adjustment | EA: Editor approval

AA by Franz Goerlich on behalf of the Authors (25 Nov 2020) Author's adjustment Manuscript

EA: Adjustments approved (25 Nov 2020) by Kirsten Elger

Short summary

This work indicates all glaciers in the Pamir that surged between 1988 and 2018 as revealed by different remote sensing data, mainly Landsat imagery. We found ~ 200 surging glaciers for the entire mountain range and detected the minimum and maximum extents of most of them. The smallest surging glacier is ~ 0.3 km². This inventory is important for further research on the surging behaviour of glaciers and has to be considered when processing glacier changes (mass, area) of the region.