• Canadian Glaciers: The Canadian Glacier Information Centre (CGIC) currently controls data and literature about Canadian glaciers. The principal collection element is the Canadian Glacier Inventory, a printed and electronic catalogue of Canada's glaciers, complemented by an air photo collection. The CGIC also houses regional glacier inventories generated by other institutions and other types of information on Canadian glaciers. Much of the CGIC collection is rare and cannot be found elsewhere.

• World Glacier Monitoring Service: The World Glacier Monitoring Service (WGMS) is based in Zurich, Switzerland, and currently coordinates the reporting of glaciers and mass balance studies across the world (including those in Canada). It maintains a database called the The World Glacier Inventory, which contains data for nearly 70,000 glaciers (see figure 1 for US and Canadian ones). The inventory entries are based upon a single observation in time and can be viewed as a "snapshot" of the glacier at this time.

Figure 1: Glaciers of the North American continent (excl. Greenland) contained in the The World Glacier Inventory (image from the World Glacier Inventory Service of the WGMS).

Access to the World Glacier Inventory is through an online database. The database lists the geographic location, name, size, area, length, orientation, elevation, glacial moraines and other tabular data for every glacier in the database. WGMS continuously upgrade the data, collect and periodically publish glacier inventory and fluctuation data and include satellite observations of remote glaciers and to assess ongoing changes. The WGMS currently list the following statistics for North American glaciers (actual data obtained from the World Glacier Inventory at the National Snow and Ice Data Center, University of Colorado at Boulder).

• Total number of glaciers: 1277
• Total glaciated area: 13080.6 square kilometers
• Largest glacier area: 798.14 square kilometers
• Average glacier area in basin: 5.08672 square kilometers
• Average glacier length: 1.51536 kilometers
• Average minimum elevation: 2488.75 meters ASL
• Average maximum elevation: 2689.3meters ASL

John Evans Glacier, Ellesmere Island, Nunavut:
Although the Canadian Rockies contain many thousands of active glaciers, most of the ice in Canada's 100,000 or more glaciers is locked in polar ice caps with low mass balances from year to year. Glacier models developed for mid-latitude alpine glaciers (e.g. eastern Rockies) do not perform well in simulating the mass balance of high arctic glaciers. Therefore, Canadian scientists from the University of Alberta have organised a special study of the John Evans Glacier on Ellesmere Island, Nunavut in order to develop and test extensively both energy balance and degree-day mass balance models for arctic glaciers.

Figure 2: A digital terrain model of the John Evans Glacier and surrounding topography. UWS, MWS and LWS mark three different weather stations placed on the glacier, namely upper, middle and lower respectively. Official documentation for each station is no longer available on the web (image provided by Dr. Martin Sharp, University of Alberta ).

The research so far has focused on improving the parameterizations of surface albedo and superimposed ice formation, and on developing a means of incorporating variable degree-day melting factors into degree-day models. The models are more physically-based than earlier ones, which utilised less sophisticated and strictly empirical parameterizations of surface albedo and superimposed ice formation. These new models have substantially improved simulations of present-day mass balance for high arctic glaciers. They are also portable to other glacier sites - this is important, given the long term goal of investigating regional patterns in mass balance history and in the sensitivity of mass balance to climate change within the high arctic.

Figure 3: Change of height of the Upper Weather Station on the John Evans Glacier between summer 1996 and summer 2000.

Figure 3 above shows the surface elevation change data for the Upper Weather Station on the John Evans Glacier since 1996. Temperature data from all three weather stations on the glacier reveal that July and August 1999 were significantly warmer than the same months in 1998. June 1998 was an incredibly warm month, as was June 2000 (there were more positive degree days in June 2000 than in the whole of summer 1996). Winter 1998/99 was very light in terms of snowfall, so melts during summer 2000 were running several weeks ahead of 'normal'.