Support for a Workshop on Instrumentation for Polar Glaciology and Geophysics Research

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This award provides partial support for a two-day workshop on Instrumentation for Polar Glaciology and Geophysics Research to be held in the greater Washington DC area, in October 2014. The funding will support participant travel, participant travel arrangement, venue, and publication costs. Additional funding from NASA will be provided to support personnel costs associated with the organizing committee. This workshop is designed to bring together the glaciology and geophysics communities to review ground-based, airborne, and spaceborne instrumentation (e.g., radar, lidar, seismics, GPS, etc.) that either exists or is in development and which is ideal for Arctic and Antarctic research. Due to the spatial scale and depth of Earth's polar ice sheets, many fundamental research topics, which are ultimately of global significance, require remote-sensing or ice-penetrating techniques and instrumentation. There are many scientists studying these ice sheets and their connections to other Earth systems, who often use a variety of these techniques and instrumentation. However, due to the nature of these techniques and instrumentation, which are often specialized or refined for polar applications, many scientists are unfamiliar with instrument capabilities that are complementary to their scientific goals. This workshop aims to bring together these interested parties to assess current polar instrumentation and identify a means of communicating the nature and value of this instrumentation to the broader community.The specific goals of this workshop are to: 1) assess the current state of both in-development and mature instrumentation; 2) identify limitations within existing instrumentation; 3) develop a means of communicating, and updating, the broader community (especially researchers that are new to polar science) of these technical capabilities; and 4) provide guidance to funding agencies (e.g., NSF and NASA) on how to continuously communicate the available instrumentation to the broader community. Notes from workshop discussions will form the basis of: 1) a report that summarizes the workshop and addresses the 4 goals; and 2) a publication of the highlights of the report in a journal such as EOS, to inform the broader community. The workshop seeks to involve as many early career researchers as possible by incorporating some of them into the Steering Committee and through funded invitations to attend or present. Further, the workshop will provide a means of informing the broader community of existing technologies that will assist current and new polar researchers with many aspects of their NSF-funded projects, including field-site selection and access to complementary instrumentation or existing datasets.