Worldwide version-controlled database of glacier thickness observations

Abstract. Although worldwide inventories of glacier area have been coordinated internationally for several decades, a similar effort for glacier ice thicknesses was only initiated in 2013. Here, we present the third version of the Glacier Thickness Database (GlaThiDa v3), which includes 3 854 279 thickness measurements distributed over more than 3000 glaciers worldwide. Overall, 14 % of global glacier area is now within 1 km of a thickness measurement – a significant improvement over GlaThiDa v2, which covered only 6 % of global glacier area, and only 1100 glaciers. In this paper, we summarize the sources and compilation of glacier thickness data and the spatial and temporal coverage of the resulting database. In addition, we detail our use of open-source metadata formats and software tools to describe the data, validate the data against this description, and track changes to the data following modern data management best-practices. Archived versions GlaThiDa are available from the World Glacier Monitoring Service ( https://doi.org/10.5904/wgms-glathida-2019-03 ; GlaThiDa Consortium (2019)) and the development version (v3.1.0-rc1, from which this manuscript draft is generated) is available on GitLab ( https://gitlab.com/wgms/glathida/-/tree/v3.1.0-rc1 ).