Glacier Mass Change Algorithm

Receiving Data from NASA’s Global Precipitation Measurement System (GPM):

In order to get snowfall data for a specific glacier, we send a call to the GPM API with the date, latitude and longitude of the glacier, and type of precipitation (in this case, precip_30mn_frozen). Data is returned in the form of a JSON file, from which we can extract a GeoTIFF file that contains the precipitation accumulation visualized within the area.

GeoTIFF files are an extension of TIFF files (which stands for Tagged Image File Format). Like TIFF, GeoTIFF is a raster graphic file type, only GeoTIFF makes use of TIFF layers in order to store geological metadata alongside the raw data. As a result, GeoTIFF files tend to be large, but they’re an effectively “lossless” way of compressing and sending data, and all information is contained within one file.