Using GIS technique to analyze the World glacier inventory
Dr. Khromova
Institute of Geography Russian Academy of Sciences
Department of glaciology
Staromonetny, 29, Moscow, Russia
E-mail: Khromova@glacinfo.msk.ru
A great amount of information has accumulated in all areas of geographical knowledge, including the glaciology. To get this information available for investigators and decision makers is one of the main problems of today. One needs to transform information to modern formats for storing and handling spatial data. It will enable not only quickly to get wanted information, but to get new knowledge using traditional data and GIS technique.
The goal of this paper is to demonstrate the using glaciological data in GIS environment. We used the 1:600 000 maps of Caucasus glaciers from the World Atlas of snow and ice resources. These maps include counters and geographical situation of each glacier in the region. The translation of these maps into digital vector format was done with ARC/INFO package : scanning maps and interactive vectorization of the images.
The other type of the data was the World glacier inventory which is the kind of electronic tables. These electronic tables were used as attributive data base for ARC/INFO coverage's contain glaciers. As a result we was able to construct the set of maps in GIS environment, to snow the spatial distribution of glacier features in the region. Visualization of World glacier inventory let us to apply spatial statistical analysis to study spatial correlation between glacier features, climate and relief.