World Glacier Monitoring Service (WGMS), University of Zurich
Annual mass-change estimates for the world's glaciers (version 2026-02-10)
Annual glacier mass change for every glacier, 19 glacier regions (Southern Andes split in two), a 0.5-degree grid and the world, for hydrological years 1976-2025: metres water equivalent, gigatonnes and millimetres of sea level equivalent, each with a one-sigma uncertainty, plus glacier area. Made by combining multi-year satellite elevation-change estimates with annual field measurements from the WGMS Fluctuations of Glaciers database. Hydrological years run from 1 October in the Northern Hemisphere, 1 April in the Southern Hemisphere and 1 January in the tropics, labelled by the year they end. In global.csv, mass loss is negative in Gt and positive in mm of sea level equivalent. The latest year is revised in the next release.
Numbers published from it
Licence and credit
- What the terms say
“Thus, WGMS data are open access under the requirement of correct citation (see database version), which corresponds to a CC BY 4.0 license by Creative Commons.”
From the producer's terms, checked 2026-10-04; re-checked automatically every week.
- Credit we give
- WGMS (2026), Annual mass-change estimates for the world's glaciers, version 2026-02-10, doi:10.5904/wgms-amce-2026-02-10; Dussaillant et al. (2025), Earth System Science Data 17, 1977–2006, doi:10.5194/essd-17-1977-2025. CC BY 4.0.
- Copy of the raw file
- Allowed: we keep a public copy of every version we use.
- Cite as
- WGMS (2026): Annual mass-change estimates for the world's glaciers. Individual glacier time series and gridded data products. Digital media. https://doi.org/10.5904/wgms-amce-2026-02-10 Dussaillant, I., Hugonnet, R., Huss, M., Berthier, E., Bannwart, J., Paul, F., and Zemp, M. (2025): Annual mass change of the world's glaciers from 1976 to 2024 by temporal downscaling of satellite data with in-situ observations. Earth System Science Data 17(5): 1977–2006. https://doi.org/10.5194/essd-17-1977-2025
Files
Zip of README.md, global.csv (year, area_km2, mwe, gt, mmsle with sigmas and cumulative sums), region/<code>.csv for the 2017 GTN-G regions (SA1 and SA2 for the Southern Andes), glacier/<region>_*.csv per-glacier series and metadata, and global_grid.nc4 (0.5-degree grid). 53,589,520 bytes.
https://wgms.ch/downloads/wgms-amce-2026-02-10.zip
Status
- Programme
- Version 2026-02-10 (zip dated 24 February 2026) covers hydrological years to 2025. WGMS releases a new version each February with the previous year added; the landing page also links the earlier 2025-02 version. Swiss-based, within the Global Terrestrial Network for Glaciers.
- Updates
- Annual (each February, as a new versioned DOI and file)
- Last check
- Unchanged since the last fetch (2026-10-05T11:06:30Z)