Hello all, The year 2015 was wonderfully productive for GLIMS. We want to thank everyone who contributed data, ideas, funds, or sweat to the GLIMS initiative over the last year. Here are some highlights of major developments: - We have a new single point of contact for both GLIMS and RGI: If you have data to contribute to GLIMS and RGI, sending email to glacierdata@nsidc.org will notify both groups. For transfer of large files, ask in your message about our new FTP site for the purpose. - We have a new online map application for viewing GLIMS (and other) glacier data. See http://www.glims.org/maps/glims - Leadership of GLIMS has changed. Jeff Kargel handed the reins over to me, and a new GLIMS Core Team will be announced shortly. - We have developed more tools at NSIDC for handling contributed data. In the past, data contributors needed to put glacier data into a prescribed format. While that format still does make ingest easier, we can now handle more variations, as long as the relevant information is included. If you have data you'd like to contribute but aren't sure about its format, let us know at glacierdata@nsidc.org and we can help figure out how to get the data into GLIMS. - We continue to merge the Randolph Glacier Inventory (RGI) into GLIMS and to ingest data sets from other sources. New data added in 2015 include glacier outlines and related data for: - RGI: Antarctica and sub-Antarctic islands; Greenland periphery; New Zealand (redone to include hypsometry from RGI 5.0); Arctic Canada; low-latitude glaciers; southern South America - Iran - Some updates have been made to personnel records in the GLIMS database (send me your updates if you have more) - A GLIMS meeting was held during AGU in San Francisco on December 14. We discussed recent GLIMS activity, both at NSIDC and globally. Some plans for the year ahead: - Our new service-oriented architecture, completed last month, enables better interactive maps, more flexible download interfaces, more download options (more data types, RGI data model, etc.), and ease of maintenance. We will continue to build on this to make GLIMS data easier and more flexible to use. - GLIMS is one component of the Global Terrestrial Network for Glaciers (GTN-G, http://www.gtn-g.org/). We expect to continue to strengthen ties between different glacier-related institutions and glacier information sources. We also hope to announce more frequent updates to databases and summaries of holdings. - We will enhance GLIMS to provide new glacier data: surface velocity fields, glacier front positions, center lines, outline time series. - We will begin to implement a work flow so that all glacier outlines are augmented with topographic information (including hypsometry) and center lines. If you have comments or suggestions for the GLIMS team, I would be happy to hear them at braup@nsidc.org. Suggestions for both GLIMS and RGI can be sent to glacierdata@nsidc.org. We welcome your input and continued involvement. Best wishes for 2016, Bruce -- Bruce H. RAUP National Snow and Ice Data Center University of Colorado 449 UCB, Boulder, CO 80309 Phone: 303-492-8814 http://cires.colorado.edu/~braup/