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The World Glacier Monitoring Service (WGMS) maintains the collection
of information on ongoing glacier changes, when the two former ICSI
services PSFG (Permanent Service on Fluctuations of Glaciers) and TTS
/ WGI (Temporal Technical Secretary / World Glacier Inventory) were
combined.
As a contribution to the Global Environment Monitoring System (GEMS /
GTOS) of the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) and to the
International Hydrological Programme (IHP) of the United Nations
Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation (UNESCO), the WGMS
of the International Commission on Snow and Ice (ICSI / IAHS) and the
Federation of Astronomical and Geophysical Data Analysis Services
(FAGS / ICSU) today collects and publishes worldwide standardized
glacier data. At present, the WGMS gets important financial and
logistic support from the University of Zurich and the Swiss Federal
Institute of Technology, Zurich.
The tasks of the WGMS are to continuously upgrade, collect and
periodically publish glacier inventory and fluctuation data as well as
to include satellite observations of remote glaciers and to assess
ongoing changes. The WGMS database stores two types of data:
1. The World Glacier Inventory (WGI) contains glacier data describing
the spatial distribution.
2. The Fluctuations of Glaciers (FoG) and Mass Balance Bulletin (MBB)
contains data documenting changes in time (changes in mass, volume,
area and length of glaciers). These data are stored at the ETH on the
database system 'Oracle', which allows fast and selective data access.
Website: "http://www.geo.unizh.ch/wgms/"
[Summary provided by WGMS.]
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