A major bottleneck for a more accurate calculation of the potential or future contribution of glaciers and icecaps to global sea-level rise is the incompleteness of a detailed global glacier inventory. Several projects and individuals are currently working to get the global inventory more complete by using for example remote sensing techniques or digitizing of topographic maps. On the other hand, global modelling approaches face problems in extrapolating missing data and have to rely on scaling techniques to achieve global completeness.

With this session we want to invite both groups, those working towards a completion of the global glacier inventory to present their recent efforts and the status of work and those who apply models on a global scale to present their approaches and how they handle the shortcommings in data completeness. An ultimate goal would be to bring both groups closer together and define the regions where data gaps are most severe to have a focus for data creation in ongoing or future projects. Also modelling demands regarding data richness can be addressed (e.g. area-elevation distribution of glaciers, required cell size) to generate and provide the inventory data in the desired formats.