Glaciers — available datasets

Five datasets across three sources. Resolve one with Catalog().get(<id>) (a did-you-mean hint on a typo); list them with Catalog().available().

Dataset id	Source	Output	What
rgi:outlines	RGI 7.0	vector	Global glacier outlines (per GTN-G region; clipped to your bbox)
glims:outlines	GLIMS	vector	Time-series glacier outlines (WFS bbox query)
wgms:mass_balance	WGMS	tabular	Mass balance (winter / summer / annual)
wgms:front_variation	WGMS	tabular	Front variation (length change)
wgms:state	WGMS	tabular	Glacier state (elevation / area / length snapshots)

RGI selectors

An rgi:outlines request takes a bounding box (lat_lim / lon_lim or aoi=), mapped to the overlapping GTN-G first-order region(s), or a region= override naming one or more region ids directly.

id	Region	id	Region
01	Alaska	11	Central Europe
02	Western Canada and USA	12	Caucasus and Middle East
03	Arctic Canada North	13	Central Asia
04	Arctic Canada South	14	South Asia West
05	Greenland Periphery	15	South Asia East
06	Iceland	16	Low Latitudes
07	Svalbard and Jan Mayen	17	Southern Andes
08	Scandinavia	18	New Zealand
09	Russian Arctic	19	Subantarctic and Antarctic Islands
10	North Asia (spans the antimeridian)

Region 20 (Antarctic Mainland) is the ice sheet and is not part of the RGI glacier product.

GLIMS selectors

A glims:outlines request takes a bounding box plus an optional max_features= cap on the WFS result. GLIMS is multi-temporal — expect more than one outline per glacier, distinguished by their acquisition date.

WGMS selectors

The wgms:* datasets take optional filters: glacier_id= (one id or a list), glacier_name= (a case-insensitive substring), region= (a GTN-G region id), or a bounding box (matched against each glacier's point coordinates via the FoG glacier table). With no filter, the whole table is returned.

The WGMS FoG archive also contains a large change (elevation / volume) table; it is intentionally not exposed because it is hundreds of megabytes uncompressed.