How much glaciers thinned in High Mountain Asia — HMA_Glacier_dH

In plain English

What it measures. Maps how much Himalayan glaciers thinned or thickened, covering roughly 650 glaciers from 1975 to 2000 and over 1,000 glaciers from 2000 to 2016.

How it's made. Built by comparing elevation maps from declassified 1970s KH-9 spy-satellite photos and NASA's ASTER instrument on Terra, then fitting trends pixel by pixel.

How & where you'd use it. Shows how fast High Mountain Asia's glaciers are losing ice, important for understanding water supplies and sea-level contributions.

What's measured

CRYOSPHERE › GLACIERS/ICE SHEETS › GLACIER THICKNESS/ICE SHEET THICKNESS

Coverage & cadence

Time span1974-01-01 → 2017-12-31
Measured byHEXAGON KH-9 (CAMERA) · Terra (ASTER)
Processing levelLevel 2
Spatial extent75.4, 27.4, 92.9, 34.4
FormatsnetCDF-4, GeoTIFF
StatusCOMPLETE

What you can do with it

Measure sea ice, snow cover and glaciers
Watch ice-sheet elevation change
Track freeze/thaw and permafrost

Official description

This data set contains gridded thickness changes for approximately 650 Himalayan glaciers between 1975 and 2000, and 1040 Himalayan glaciers between 2000 and 2016. The data were derived from KH-9 HEXAGON and ASTER digital elevation models (DEMs), by fitting robust linear trends to time series of elevation pixels over the glacier surfaces.

Get the data

hma_glacier_dh_access.py

import earthaccess
earthaccess.login(strategy="netrc")          # free Earthdata Login

results = earthaccess.search_data(
    short_name="HMA_Glacier_dH",
    version="1",
    bounding_box=(-122.5, 37.2, -121.8, 37.9),  # your area (W,S,E,N)
    temporal=("2024-01-01", "2024-12-31"),       # your dates
)
files = earthaccess.open(results)   # stream straight from NSIDC_CPRD

Browsing CMR needs no login. Downloading or streaming bytes needs a free Earthdata Login + the earthaccess package.

What's measured

Coverage & cadence

What you can do with it

Get the data

Official links