Session announcement and Call for Abstracts American Geophysical Union (AGU) Fall Meeting 15-19 December 2008, San Francisco, California Papers are invited for Session A35: Cooperative Studies Incorporating Measurements from Land-Based Atmospheric Arctic Observatories The main mission of the International Arctic Systems for Observing the Atmosphere (IASOA) is coordination of atmospheric data collection and observatories. The effort supports the International Polar Year (IPY, www.ipy.org), but is intended to establish a continuing network consortium into the foreseeable future. Data of interest to the IASOA consortium include measurements of standard meteorology, greenhouse gases, atmospheric radiation, clouds, pollutants, chemistry, aeros...

The head of the Research Unit Potsdam of the Alfred Wegener Institute for Polar and Marine Research in the Helmholtz Association, Prof. Dr. Hans-Wolfgang Hubberten, is the new president of the International Permafrost Association IPA. His appointment took place at the 9th International Conference on Permafrost in Fairbanks, Alaska. Prof. Hubberten will lead the International Permafrost Association for the next four years. During his term in office he will coordinate, among other things, the analysis of the scientific results of the International Polar Year. “In these times of global warming, research on permafrost gains in importance”, explains Hubberten. Permanently frozen areas of the polar region and higher latitudes, which make up about 25% of the earth's surface, a...

Dr. Manish Tiwari, scientist at the National Centre For Antarctic & Ocean Research in Goa, India, writes: India is enthusiastically pursuing the outreach goal of IPY, which is being coordinated by National Centre for Antarctic & Ocean Research (NCAOR, under the Ministry of Earth Sciences, Govt. of India) in collaboration with WWF-India (World Wide Fund for Nature). Several competitions were conducted for the school children throughout India that included poster & model making, projects, stamp designing etc. as outlined in the chart below. The award winning posters of the first competition i.e.,...

A 150-meter ice core pulled from the McCall Glacier in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge this summer may offer researchers their first quantitative look at up to two centuries of climate change in the region. The core, which is longer than 1 1/2 football fields, is the longest extracted from an arctic glacier in the United States, according to Matt Nolan, an associate professor at the University of Alaska Fairbanks Institute of Northern Engineering who has led research at McCall Glacier for the past six years. The sample spans the entire depth of the glacier and may cover 200 years of history, he said. What we hope is that the climate record will extend back into the Little Ice Age,said Nolan. Up until the late 1800s these glaciers were actually gr...

Contents: 1. Report from St Petersburg meetings and conference 2. Plans for February 25th, 2009 3. Upcoming Polar Days: People & Above The Poles 4. Call for Sessions at Oslo Science Conference June 2010 Report no. 15, July 2008 From: IPY International Programme Office To: IPY Project Coordinators cc: IPY Community Google Groups 1. Report from St Petersburg meetings and conference Many members of the IPY Community are currently meeting in St Petersburg and Moscow for a range of business meetings as well as participation in the SCAR/IASC Open Science Conference. So far, the events have been a great success. We have so far participated in meetings for the IPY Joint Committee...

What's it like to be a research scientist working in the Arctic and Antarctica? In celebration of the International Polar Year, the Exploratorium gave polar scientists cameras and blogs and asked them to document their fieldwork in real time. The result is a groundbreaking Web-based project, Ice Stories: Dispatches from Polar Scientists (http://icestories.exploratorium.edu), where you can follow along on the scientists’ research, ask questions, and share ...

From the mountains to the coast - the Alfred Wegener Institute for Polar and Marine Research based in Bremerhaven inherits the World Radiation Monitoring Center, Switzerland The international archive for radiation data, the World Radiation Monitoring Center (WRMC), provides climate research with high-precision meteorological series of measurements. After a term of fifteen years at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Zurich (ETHZ), the Alfred Wegener Institute for Polar and Marine Research in the Helmholtz Association ensures the successful continuity and enhancements of this unique archive. These data serve the monitoring of the climate, the surveillance of anthropological influence on the earth's surface as well as the improvement of climate forecasts. ...

How will the Arctic sea ice cover develop this summer? ­ Climate scientists from the Alfred Wegener Institute present their own prognosis for the first time Bremerhaven, July 7, 2008. The ice cover in the Arctic Ocean at the end of summer 2008 will lie, with almost 100 per cent probability, below that of the year 2005 ­ the year with the second lowest sea ice extent ever measured. Chances of an equally low value as in the extreme conditions of the year 2007 lie around eight per cent. Climate scientists from the Alfred Wegener Institute for Polar and Marine Research in the Helmholtz Association come to this conclusion in a recent model calculation. They participate with their prognosis in an international scientific contest, in which some of the most renowned institutes on ...

An explorative and research expedition bordering on the inhabited world, in order to investigate the lands and the people living face to face with the ice. How could some hunter groups reach a remote area of Eastern Greenland, known as the Ammassalik District? The answer is not easy, but an Italian scientific expedition is trying to find a possible explanation to the question, while exploring the ice land. The expedition, called Saxum, is led by Gianluca Frinchillucci, director of the Polar Museum “S. Zavatti” of Fermo and responsible for the project CNR-Polarnet “Map of Arctic People”, on his seventh polar explorative mission, and involves several researchers and Italian universities. The initiative falls into the few Italian projects p...

International Award for Information Technology Goes to Research Institutions in the German Federal State of Bremen for the Data Library PANGAEA® The Alfred Wegener Institute for Polar and Marine Research in the Helmholtz Association (AWI) and the Center for Marine Environmental Sciences (MARUM) received the 21st Century Achievement Award of the Computerworld Honors Program in the category Environment, which is one of the most prestigious awards in information technology. The award has been granted in response to PANGAEA¹s implementation and successful operation of a unique information system for archiving, publishing and processing of earth system data. Designed to support an integral view on earth, this information system was named after the supercontinent, combining all ...