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<front>
<journal-meta>
<journal-id journal-id-type="publisher">ESSDD</journal-id>
<journal-title-group>
<journal-title>Earth System Science Data Discussions</journal-title>
<abbrev-journal-title abbrev-type="publisher">ESSDD</abbrev-journal-title>
<abbrev-journal-title abbrev-type="nlm-ta">Earth Syst. Sci. Data Discuss.</abbrev-journal-title>
</journal-title-group>
<issn pub-type="epub">1866-3591</issn>
<publisher><publisher-name></publisher-name>
<publisher-loc>Göttingen, Germany</publisher-loc>
</publisher>
</journal-meta>
<article-meta>
<article-id pub-id-type="doi">10.5194/essd-2025-304</article-id>
<title-group>
<article-title>Calving front positions for Greenland outlet glaciers (2002&amp;ndash;2021): a spatially extensive seasonal record and benchmark dataset for algorithm validation</article-title>
</title-group>
<contrib-group><contrib contrib-type="author" xlink:type="simple"><name name-style="western"><surname>Lu</surname>
<given-names>Xi</given-names>
</name>
<xref ref-type="aff" rid="aff1">
<sup>1</sup>
</xref>
<xref ref-type="aff" rid="aff2">
<sup>2</sup>
</xref>
</contrib>
<contrib contrib-type="author" xlink:type="simple"><name name-style="western"><surname>Jiang</surname>
<given-names>Liming</given-names>
<ext-link>https://orcid.org/0000-0002-1127-9823</ext-link>
</name>
<xref ref-type="aff" rid="aff1">
<sup>1</sup>
</xref>
<xref ref-type="aff" rid="aff2">
<sup>2</sup>
</xref>
</contrib>
<contrib contrib-type="author" xlink:type="simple"><name name-style="western"><surname>Li</surname>
<given-names>Daan</given-names>
</name>
<xref ref-type="aff" rid="aff3">
<sup>3</sup>
</xref>
</contrib>
<contrib contrib-type="author" xlink:type="simple"><name name-style="western"><surname>Liu</surname>
<given-names>Yi</given-names>
<ext-link>https://orcid.org/0000-0001-7128-562X</ext-link>
</name>
<xref ref-type="aff" rid="aff1">
<sup>1</sup>
</xref>
<xref ref-type="aff" rid="aff2">
<sup>2</sup>
</xref>
</contrib>
<contrib contrib-type="author" xlink:type="simple"><name name-style="western"><surname>Sole</surname>
<given-names>Andrew</given-names>
<ext-link>https://orcid.org/0000-0001-5290-8967</ext-link>
</name>
<xref ref-type="aff" rid="aff4">
<sup>4</sup>
</xref>
</contrib>
<contrib contrib-type="author" xlink:type="simple"><name name-style="western"><surname>Livingstone</surname>
<given-names>Stephen John</given-names>
<ext-link>https://orcid.org/0000-0002-7240-5037</ext-link>
</name>
<xref ref-type="aff" rid="aff4">
<sup>4</sup>
</xref>
</contrib>
</contrib-group><aff id="aff1">
<label>1</label>
<addr-line>State Key Laboratory of Precision Geodesy, Innovation Academy for Precision Measurement Science and Technology, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Wuhan 430077, China</addr-line>
</aff>
<aff id="aff2">
<label>2</label>
<addr-line>College of Earth and Planetary Science, University of Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing 100049, China</addr-line>
</aff>
<aff id="aff3">
<label>3</label>
<addr-line>College of Urban and Environmental Sciences, Yancheng Teachers University, Yancheng 224002,  China</addr-line>
</aff>
<aff id="aff4">
<label>4</label>
<addr-line>School of Geography and Planning, University of Sheffield, Sheffield, S10 2TN, UK</addr-line>
</aff>
<pub-date pub-type="epub">
<day>26</day>
<month>08</month>
<year>2025</year>
</pub-date>
<volume>2025</volume>
<fpage>1</fpage>
<lpage>25</lpage>
<permissions>
<copyright-statement>Copyright: &#x000a9; 2025 Xi Lu et al.</copyright-statement>
<copyright-year>2025</copyright-year>
<license license-type="open-access">
<license-p>This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. To view a copy of this licence, visit <ext-link ext-link-type="uri"  xlink:href="https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/">https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/</ext-link></license-p>
</license>
</permissions>
<self-uri xlink:href="https://essd.copernicus.org/preprints/essd-2025-304/">This article is available from https://essd.copernicus.org/preprints/essd-2025-304/</self-uri>
<self-uri xlink:href="https://essd.copernicus.org/preprints/essd-2025-304/essd-2025-304.pdf">The full text article is available as a PDF file from https://essd.copernicus.org/preprints/essd-2025-304/essd-2025-304.pdf</self-uri>
<abstract>
<p>Calving front positions of marine-terminating glaciers are a key indicator of variations in glacier dynamics, ice&amp;ndash;ocean interactions, and serve as critical boundary conditions for ice sheet models. High-precision, long-term records of calving front variability are essential for understanding glacier recession and calving processes, improving mass loss estimates, and supporting the development and validation of robust automated front-tracking algorithms. However, existing datasets often exhibit limited spatial coverage, inconsistent temporal resolution, and heterogeneous delineation methods, which result in variable accuracy and insufficient detail, reducing the performance and transferability of automated calving front detection. Here, we present a spatially extensive, high-accuracy dataset of glacier calving front positions across Greenland, intended as a benchmark for algorithm training, model&amp;ndash;data integration, and studies of seasonal glacier dynamics. The dataset comprises approximately 12,000 manually delineated calving front positions for ~290 outlet glaciers from 2002 through 2021, extracted from multi-source satellite imagery (Landsat, Sentinel-1/2, MODIS, ENVISAT, and ERS). Delineations were conducted using standardized workflows in the Google Earth Engine platform and ArcGIS, and each record is accompanied by comprehensive metadata, including acquisition date, digitization method, source imagery, and other relevant attributes. Positional accuracy was evaluated through comparison with high-resolution PlanetScope imagery and manually interpreted reference datasets, confirming high geometric fidelity with positional offsets ranging from about 40 to 100 m across representative glaciers, depending on image resolution and terminus complexity. In contrast, automated products tend to show reduced accuracy in verification areas with complex terminus morphology, reflecting their high sensitivity to image quality, limited generalizability across heterogeneous geometries, and the absence of large-scale, high-precision training data. This dataset contributes to mitigating these challenges by providing dense, manually validated, high-precision observations across Greenland, serving as a robust benchmark for developing and validating automated front detection algorithms, refining boundary representations in ice sheet models, and advancing understanding of ice&amp;ndash;ocean interactions. The dataset is publicly available at &lt;a href=&quot;https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.16879054&quot; target=&quot;_blank&quot; rel=&quot;noopener&quot;&gt;https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.16879054&lt;/a&gt; (Xi et al., 2025).</p>
</abstract>
<counts><page-count count="25"/></counts>
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