AGILE v0.1: The Open Global Glacier Data Assimilation Framework

Abstract. The growing availability of glacier observations poses a challenge for models to integrate this heterogeneous information in a dynamically consistent way. At the same time, estimates of current glacier volume and area remain uncertain, as many global inventories and thickness datasets date back to the early 2000s. We present the Open Global Glacier Data Assimilation Framework, named AGILE, a time-dependent variational method inspired by 4D-Var data assimilation. AGILE is built on a reimplementation of the OGGM flowline glacier evolution model in PyTorch, enabling full differentiability through automatic differentiation (AD). We test AGILE v0.1 in a series of idealized experiments designed to reflect common initialization and calibration scenarios in global glacier modeling. The goal is to recover glacier bed topography and distributed ice volume in 2020 through transient calibration, based on dynamical simulations starting in 1980. In these experiments, we assume a perfectly known mass balance and fixed ice dynamics parameters. While this setup simplifies real-world complexity, it allows us to isolate and evaluate the core functionality of the approach. Our results show that AGILE efficiently optimizes multiple control variables by leveraging AD-derived gradients, requiring only a few iterations to substantially improve upon initial guesses. We also examine the potential to reconstruct earlier glacier states (e.g., in 1980) without direct observations and find that this is fundamentally limited because glacier dynamics are governed by a diffusion equation, which leads to a loss of information about past states over time, even in an idealized setting. Overall, our experiments demonstrate AGILE’s potential as a flexible and efficient data assimilation framework. Its ability to integrate diverse datasets in a dynamically consistent manner makes it a promising tool for future real-world glacier modeling applications.