Project title: Inventory of Caucasus glaciers

Funding organization: Shota Rustaveli National Science Foundation of Georgia

Start and end dates:2017

Principal investigator: Levan Tielidze

Key personnel: Levan Tielidze

Project Summary: Remote sensing is an ideal tool for annual glacier monitoring, quantity, exposure, disaster risk assessment, elevation, dynamics, morphological types, area, volume and contemporary climate change.

Achieved results: Within the scope of the grant, a complete inventory of the Caucasus glaciers was made using remote sensing and geo-information systems (GIS). This method is ideal for annual monitoring of glaciers, quantity, exposure, disaster risk assessment, height above sea level, dynamics, morphological types, area, volume and recent climate change. Thus, one of the project's uniqueness lies in the fact that all the issues mentioned above were assessed and studied within the framework of the presented grant project. The inventory of the Caucasus glaciers is essential to the extent that after the 1960s (Soviet inventory), studies of similar content have not been conducted on the Caucasus. The complete database of Caucasus glaciers, compiled based on the latest information obtained by the remote sensing method, will be constantly updated in the future, which will significantly simplify the work to be carried out for future research. Within the framework of the project, scientific connections were also established with such scientific organizations of the world as the National Snow and Ice Center of the University of Colorado (USA) (http://nsidc.org/) and the World Glacier Monitoring Center of the University of Zurich (Switzerland) (http://wgms.ch/ ).