Possible GLIMS Workshop, Boulder - 2008

[Richard Armstrong]

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 at nsidc.org <mailto:rlax at 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