Welcome to the UNO GLIMS Website.

The University of Nebraska at Omaha is host to the Global Land Ice Measurements from Space (GLIMS) Regional Center (RC) for Southwest Asia, which includes the Hindu Kush and western Himalaya mountains of Afghanistan and Pakistan..

The International GLIMS project is a global consortium of universities and research institutes, coordinated by the University of Arizona, whose purpose is to assess and monitor the Earth’s glaciers from space for better resource management and planning.  These scientific, management, and planning objectives are supported by objectives of the United Nations and entail:

• Comprehensive satellite multispectral and stereo-image acquisition of land ice 
• Use of satellite image data to measure interannual changes in glacier area, boundaries, and snowline elevation 
• Measurement of glacier velocity fields 
• Assessment of water resource potential 
• Assessment of hazard potential (glacier-lake breakout floods, landslides, etc.)
• Development of a comprehensive digital database to inventory the world’s glaciers, with pointers to other data and relevant scientific publications – such as that located at the National Snow and Ice Data Center (NSIDC) in Boulder, CO, USA

Assessment of the world’s total ice mass, its cryosphere, is a vital measure of the health of planet Earth as its temperature rises and its stored water resources melt away, dry out the land, raise the level of the sea, and make natural environments less stable.  Many tens of millions of people in South Asia depend absolutely upon the annual melting of snow and glaciers to provide their drinking waters and irrigation for their staple crops.  As their glaciers melt away forever the resulting melt-water shortages can only contribute to ever more problems that the GLIMS Project helps to analyze for solutions where possible.