Glacier Model Intercomparison Project

Background and motivation

Currently, glaciers (here defined as all glaciers other than the ice sheets) are significant contributors to sea-level rise, with current rates similar to those of the Greenland ice sheet. Projections indicate that glaciers will continue to lose mass and contribute to sea-level rise throughout the 21st century. Glaciers are also important regulators of seasonal water availability in many regions, and may cause geohazards. Hence, it is essential to develop accurate predictive tools of the glaciers’ response to climate change suitable for regional to global scales.

Goals and Objectives

The overall goal of GlacierMIP is to provide a framework for a coordinated intercomparison of global-scale glacier mass change models to foster model improvements and reduce uncertainties in global glacier projections.

The specific objectives are:

to coordinate model intercomparisons of existing state-of-the-art large-scale glacier models with respect to decadal to millennial scale glacier mass change simulations to identify current model deficiencies and data needs, and work towards a new generation of global-scale glacier models that allow more accurate projections
to disseminate results through publications and presentations at conferences and workshops.

Our goals will be achieved by establishing community-based standardized experiment designs, forcing data, and deliverable output variables, as well as the defining of deadlines, milestones and deliverables.

Contact info

Regine Hock, Co-chair

regineho@uio.no

David Rounce, Co-chair

drounce@cmu.edu

More Resources

Activities and Experiments
GlacierMIP GitHub
GlacierMIP3 Info

Collaboration

We work closely with other internationally coordinated activities and organizations such as the Ice Sheet Model Intercomparison Project for CMIP7/6, ISMIP7/6, to ensure our data outputs follow shared standards, or several IACS Working Groups focused on glacier inventory and mass balance data to ensure that necessary data for initial boundary conditions of the experiments are available.

GlacierMIP Phases

GlacierMIP was started in February 2015. The first two phases focused on model intercomparison of century-scale global projections (Hock et al. 2019, Marzeion et al. 2020), while the third phase focused on millenium-scale committed glacier mass losses for various stable climate scenarios (Zekollari and Schuster et al 2025). Details and simulation protocols are detailed here.

GlacierMIP4: Get Involved

Currently, the fourth phase of GlacierMIP (GlacierMIP4) is underway focusing on projection of glacier changes based on the latest generation of climatic projections (CMIP6 and CMIP7). An open call for participation was announced on Cryolist in summer 2025.

Participants will be expected to:

Have developed, or have access to, a glacier evolution model capable of computing glaciers on large scales, preferably global (at least one complete RGI region must be covered)
Project regional- to global-scale glacier evolution with their large-scale model and submit their model runs following GlacierMIP’s experiment protocol. Data must be submitted by 15 August 2026 at the latest.
Participate in group workshops when possible.

All details about GlacierMIP4, including the protocol for the model experiments, are available here.

A project meeting was held at the Global Glacier Modelling Workshop in Obergurgl, Austria, 24-28 August 2026.

For more information, please contact the GlacierMIP co-chairs: Regine Hock (regine.hock@geo.uio.no) and David Rounce (drounce@cmu.edu).

Latest GlacierMIP News

Recent Publications