Dear GLIMS RCs, Stewards, and affiliates As many of you know there have been several highly successful GLIMS Workshops over the past 8 years in such locations as Switzerland, Maryland, France, Norway, England, and New Zealand, and some smaller meetings in Italy, California and Arizona. It has been 7 years since there has been a GLIMS workshop in the United States with significant international participation. We are therefore considering holding a GLIMS workshop in Boulder, Colorado during the summer of 2008, most likely during the month of June, prior to the Ninth International Workshop on Permafrost in Fairbanks Alaska. Considering your other conference and holiday travel plans, and your travel budget, what is your general interest in a 2008 Boulder workshop? What types of instruction and exchange of information you would like to see on the agenda? The workshop could include hands-on demos and short training sessions that would focus on 1) algorithms to generate glacier outlines, including the latest methods to map debris-covered glaciers, 2) generating DEMs, 3) post-processing of outlines for ingest into GLIMS, and similar topics. A clear advantage of having such a workshop at NSIDC, the location of the GLIMS database, is that participants would benefit from the presence of all NSIDC personnel representing the combined expertise behind the design, development and maintenance of the spatially-enabled GLIMS database, map server and other Web-interfaces. In addition, depending on the breadth of your cryospheric research interests, you might very well enjoy the opportunity to connect with other researchers at NSIDC working in fields such as snow cover, frozen ground, sea ice, ice sheets and ice shelves. One general goal of this proposed workshop could be to review pertinent topics and concerns discussed at previous workshops in order to assess which of these have been adequately dealt with, which remain as concerns but are, for whatever reason, beyond the resources or technologies currently available, and finally, which tasks should be identified as the highest priority, to be addressed immediately through the collaborative synergy and strength of the international GLIMS project. Please inform us of your level of interest in a Boulder workshop, your preferred dates during summer 2008, as well as any suggestions you might have for specific discussion topics. please respond directly to: Richard Armstrong, PI, GLIMS at NSIDC rlax@nsidc.org <mailto:rlax@nsidc.org> -- Richard L. Armstrong, Senior Research Scientist CIRES/NSIDC, 1540 30th Street University of Colorado, Boulder, CO, 80303 USA phone: 303-492-1828, fax: 303-492-2468