[GLIMS] Update for September 2015

[Bruce RAUP]

Hi all.

This is a short update on recent GLIMS activity.  More information about 
the GLIMS meeting in San Francisco (piggy-backed on AGU) will be coming 
later, but we will find a time during the week for it after the AGU 
schedule is out.

- The effort to merge the Randolph Glacier Inventory (RGI) into GLIMS is
   ongoing, as are ingests of new data from other sources.  New data added
   in 2015 include glacier outlines and related data for:

   - Antarctica and sub-Antarctic islands

   - Greenland periphery

   - New Zealand (redone to include hypsometry from RGI 5.0)

   - Arctic Canada (still working on some of the attributes for those
     outlines)

   - Iran


- Some updates have been made to personnel records in the GLIMS database
   (send me your updates if you have more)


- Many website improvements are currently under development.  We are
   transitioning to a service-oriented architecture which will lead to a
   more pleasant and intuitive user experience.  Benefits will include:
   better interactive map, more flexible download interface, more download
   options (more data types, RGI data model, etc.), ease of maintenance.


- 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 at nsidc.org will notify all of us.  For transfer of large
   files, ask in your message about our new FTP site for the purpose.


- We have developed more tools at NSIDC for handling contributed data.  In
   the past, we needed data in a very specific format to be able to accept
   it.  While that format still does make ingest easier, we can now handle
   more deviations from that format.  So, if you have data you'd like to
   contribute but aren't sure about it's format, let us know at
   glacierdata at nsidc.org and we can help figure out how to get the job done.


Best regards to all,
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/