Photogrammetric scans of aerial photographs of North American glaciers

• Main Authors: Nolan, Dr. Matt, Post, Austin S., Hauer, William, Zinck, Alexander, O'Neel, Shad
• Format: Dataset
• Language: English
• Published: NSF Arctic Data Center 2017
• Subjects: Alaska; glacier; aerial; USGS; Austin; glaciers
• Online Access: https://dx.doi.org/10.18739/a2jh3d336; https://arcticdata.io/catalog/view/doi:10.18739/A2JH3D336

Introduction: Between 1958 and 1999, Austin Post led the USGS collection of aerial imagery of North American glaciers. These images are primarily vertical stereo black and white images, although single oblique images, as well as color images have been collected. The glaciers of North America were the subjects, and the digital products made available here serve to document the changes that have occurred to the glaciers over the past 5 decades. The purpose of this project is to preserve the data contained within these film images in a digital format for future analysis of North American glacier change. File Layout: The first level (this level) contains an overall data set of image metadata from 1964 - 1997 (nagapData.csv), an R script (searchData.R) to subset and download images from this data package, and a README file with instructions for using searchData.R. fileLayout.pdf shows the file structure and folder contents visually. There are also three kml files with flight path information by decade. The second level is the year in which the pictures were taken. There are 32 years with images from 1964 – 1997. The majority of these folders are jpegs with notes provided by Austin Post. They also contain a year-specific csv (YYYY.csv) that contains image metadata for the entire year (date, roll numbers, location name, longitude, latitude, altitude, media, and comments). The overall data set (nagapData.csv) is the aggregate of each individual “YYYY.csv” file. The glacier photos are located at the third level. The folders at this level are distinguished by camera roll number (1, 2, etc.), and image type (thumbnail, jpeg, or tif); some also contain fiducial and oblique image folders. This level primarily contains image files of aerial photos as either thumbnails, jpegs, or tifs. It also includes a csv with image metadata specific to each roll (date, roll numbers, location name, longitude, latitude, altitude, media, and comments), a text file (info.txt) with camera specifications unique to each image, and a text file (histo.txt or matchReport.txt) with color information and scanner specifications unique to each image.