OGGM tutorials

Welcome to the OGGM tutorials, a collection of interactive notebooks designed to guide you through glacier modelling with OGGM.

If you are new to Jupyter Notebooks or JupyterLab, we recommend starting with our introduction to jupyter notebooks!

If you are reading this on our website (https://oggm.org/tutorials), note that each page displayed here is in fact a Jupyter notebook. You can launch an interactive version of these tutorials online with MyBinder or OGGM-Hub by clicking the “launch” button at the top right of this page (the little rocket 🚀).

A note on OGGM versions

⚠️ These tutorials are available in several versions:

• Stable (default): compatible with the latest official OGGM release.

• Development version: built against the latest development version of OGGM on GitHub (may include unreleased changes).

• v1.5.3 (2022): legacy tutorials for OGGM versions prior to v1.6 and the mass-balance calibration overhaul.

You can download the notebooks for any version from GitHub by selecting the corresponding branch: stable, master, v1.5.3.

Please make sure you are using matching versions of OGGM and the tutorials.

Ready to go?

10 minutes tutorials

These new tutorials are designed to illustrate one single OGGM concept at a time. They are a good way to get started with OGGM, or for returning users to learn about new features!

• 10 minutes to… a preprocessed directory (start with this tutorial if you are new to OGGM)

• 10 minutes to… a glacier change projection with GCM data

• 10 minutes to… OGGM as an accelerator for modelling and machine learning

• 10 minutes to… the new dynamical spinup in OGGM v1.6

OGGM workflow

• Working with the RGI files and prepare glaciers for a run

• Storing glacier directories for later use

• Dealing with errors after a run

• Differences between the “elevation band” and “centerline” flowlines

• Step-by-Step guide to building preprocessed directories from scratch

• What’s in my preprocessed directories? A full centerlines workflow, step by step

Mass balance

• Plotting the OGGM surface mass-balance, the ELA and AAR

• A look into the new mass balance calibration in OGGM v1.6

• Global distribution of the mass-balance model parameters

• Mass balance parameter perturbation experiments with OGGM

Hydrological output

• Hydrological mass-balance output

Dynamical runs

• Run with a long spinup and GCM data

• Dynamic spinup and dynamic melt_f calibration for past simulations

• Understand the difference between the ice dynamic solvers in OGGM

• “Instructed OGGM”: running IGM within the OGGM workflow

Ice thickness

• Ice thickness inversion

• Dynamic model initialization using observed thickness data

Calving

• The Oerlemans & Nick frontal ablation parameterization in OGGM

OGGM shop and additional data

• OGGM-Shop and Glacier Directories in OGGM

• Using your own glacier inventory with OGGM

• Ingest gridded products such as ice velocity into OGGM

• Create local topography maps from different DEM sources with OGGM

• Compare different DEMs for individual glaciers: RGI-TOPO for RGI v6.0

• RGI-TOPO for RGI 7.0

Visualisation and post-processing

• Display glacier area and thickness changes on a grid

• OGGM flowlines: where are they?

• Compute smoother centerlines for shapefile output

• Error analysis of the global pre-processing workflow

• Merge, analyse and visualize OGGM GCM runs

• Small overview of HoloViz capability of data exploration

Tutorials in (re-)construction

• Ice thickness inversion with frontal ablation

• Filter the glacier length and area time series

Have fun learning OGGM!

Package versions used to build this documentation:

# Package versions
from oggm.utils import show_versions
print(show_versions())

# OGGM environment: 
## System info:
    python: 3.13.12.final.0
    python-bits: 64
    OS: Linux
    OS-release: 6.14.0-1017-azure
    machine: x86_64
    processor: x86_64
## Packages info:
    oggm: 1.6.3.dev47+g61a0dd492
    numpy: 2.4.2
    scipy: 1.17.1
    pandas: 3.0.1
    geopandas: 1.1.2
    netCDF4: 1.7.4
    matplotlib: 3.10.8
    rasterio: 1.5.0
    fiona: 1.10.1
    pyproj: 3.7.2
    shapely: 2.1.2
    xarray: 2025.11.0
    dask: 2026.1.2
    salem: 0.3.12.dev8+g84d7f7e5c
    OGGM git identifier: 3aa6a9364b3a74bfcdea03312e7e87d5611f0550