The 2017 inventory of ice marginal lakes in Greenland (IIML) has been produced as part of the European Space Agency (ESA) Climate Change Initiative (CCI) in Option 6 of the Glaciers_cci project, and is a product that addresses the terrestrial essential climate variable (ECV) Lakes.

The IIML is a comprehensive record of all identified ice marginal lakes across the terrestrial margin of Greenland, detected using remote sensing techniques. The detected lakes are presented as polygon vector features in shapefile format, with coordinates provided in the WGS 1984 UTM Zone 24N projected coordinate system. Ice marginal lakes were identified using three independent remote sensing methods: 1) multi-temporal backscatter classification from Sentinel-1 synthetic aperture radar imagery; 2) multi-spectral indices classification from Sentinel-2 optical imagery; and 3) sink detection from the ArcticDEM (v3). All data were compiled and filtered in a semi-automated approach, using a modified version of the MEaSUREs GIMP ice mask (https://nsidc.org/data/NSIDC-0714/versions/1) to clip the dataset to within 1 km of the ice margin. Each detected lake was then verified manually. The IIML was collected to better understand the impact of ice marginal lake change on the future sea level budget and the terrestrial and marine landscapes of Greenland, such as its ecosystems and human activities.

The IIML is a complete inventory of Greenland, with no absent data.