The Antarctic Glaciological Data Center: Continued Data Collection and Management for Antarctic Glaciology

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Scambos0338134This award provides continued support for the Antarctic Glaciological Data Center (AGDC) at The National Snow and Ice Data Center (NSIDC), an archive and data distribution system for glaciological data from the U.S. Antarctic Program (USAP). This on-going effort has created a website containing recently gathered Antarctic glaciological and related data from numerous principal investigators, and compiled products of important glaciological parameters such as ice flow velocity and 10-meter temperature. The AGDC has two guiding objectives: to accumulate a record of research data from NSF-funded Antarctic glaciology grants; and to provide principal investigators in the Antarctic Glaciology program with basic geophysical parameters useful for field planning, modeling, or research analysis. The AGDC is related to, but not a part of, the U.S. Antarctic Data Coordination Center, a repository of metadata information about all Antarctic research.In this second five-year period the AGDC will improve the overall activity in a number of ways. A large number of P.I. data sets from the US-ITASE project will be added as those data are published and becoming available for archival. Additional data sets from current glaciological research will be added as well. AGDC will develop appropriate schemes for handling selected dynamic and thermodynamic modeling results, and ice-penetrating radar data sets. These are two data types that have proven difficult to manage up to now. AGDC will also continue to build the current "Compiled Product" data sets, and add to them a compilation of snow accumulation measurements, and deep ice temperature profiles. A newly-formed review panel of principal investigators will be consulted for guidance and additional suggestions of data to incorporate. The intellectual merit of the project is that the data center supports basic glaciological research by providing researchers with ready access to well-described data from past and recent activities. By having these data web-accessible, with human assistance if needed, investigators can explore ideas more rapidly, and find needed information and citations more easily. The broader impacts of the data center are that it also provides the interested public with access to information and pictures of Antarctica, and links this somewhat high-level information to more outreach-oriented sites on the NSIDC web. Further, as a long-term archive of information and data, the AGDC site is a record of the scientific exploration of Antarctica, which will become increasingly valuable with the passage of time.