Calving Front Dataset for Marine-Terminating Glaciers in Svalbard 1985-2023

Svalbard has experienced increased climate variability as a result of global warming, leading to significant mass loss in its marine-terminating glaciers over recent decades. Nevertheless, the mechanisms driving this mass loss remain less understood, primarily due to a limited understanding of calving dynamics. Here we present a new high-resolution calving front dataset of 149 marine-terminating glaciers in Svalbard, comprising 124919 glacier calving front positions during the period of 1985-2023. This dataset was generated using a novel automated deep learning framework and multiple optical and SAR satellite images from Landsat, Terra-ASTER, Sentinel-2, and Sentinel-1 satellite missions.

The information regarding the glacier calving front terminal traces, glacier centrelines, glacier domains, fjord masks and the along-centreline glacier calving front change time series is consolidated into a single Geopackage file named "Svalbard_Calving_Front_Product.gpkg." The specific file structure for this data file is detailed in Table 1, and the feature attribute table for the different data layers recorded in this data file can be found in Table 2.

Furthermore, we have included spatial distribution map plots of the glacier calving front traces and line plots depicting the time series of calving front changes for each individual glacier. These plots are provided in .PNG file format and can be accessed within the Figures folder.

Table 1. The layer structure of the Svalbard calving front data product.

Table 2. The feature attribute table of the data layer.