A Spatio-Temporal GIS Database for Monitoring Alpine Glacier Change

Monitoring alpine glacier change has many practical and scientific benefits, including yielding information on glacier-fed water supplies, glacier-associated natural hazards, and climate variability. This paper describes the design and implementation of a spatio-temporal GIS database for monitoring glacier geometry and geometric change. The temporal component of the glacier data is managed through both a 'snapshot' and time-normalization approach to the relational data model in which glacier properties are organized according to their spatial and temporal dependencies. Because of the integration of diverse historic and contemporary data sources, metadata play a key role in managing data quality. For the initial population of the database, historic and contemporary map data on six glaciers on Mount Rainier, Washington were used to model glacier geometry and examined for geometric change over the period 1913-1971.