ITASE Programme Management

ITASE Cambridge Workshop Agreement

An agreement was reached on the protocol and tasks to be completed by national participants in the ITASE programme at the International ITASE workshop, held in Cambridge, UK, during August, 1996,. The agreement is as follows:

1. ITASE will be coordinated from the SCAR Global Change Programme (GLOCHANT) office in Hobart
2. ITASE Programme Scientific Steering Committee (SSC) comprises national representatives and the GLOCHANT Coordinator
3. The GLOCHANT Coordinator (with the help of the SSC) will:
   • identify ice/firn cores of opportunity for analysis;
   • prepare annual logistics updates based on the advice from national programmes;
   • prepare thematic maps of exiting data (pre 1990) on accumulation rate, ∂ ¹⁸O, temperature and chemistry;
   • maintain a log of ITASE post 1990 data updates and add these to existing maps;
   • coordinate and manage a data centre on ITASE ice/firn core metadata and data in Hobart, and liaise with the World Data Centre-A for Paleoclimatology in Boulder, Colorado, USA and the World Data Centres A and C for Glaciology; in Boulder, Colorado, USA and Cambridge, UK.
   • coordinate a biannual ITASE workshop, on a relevant scientific theme.

International and National Linkages

ITASE is co-sponsored by SCAR-GLOCHANT and IGBP-PAGES, and forms a major contribution to the joint PAGES/CLIVAR initiative, on `providing the paleoclimatic perspective needed to understand climate variability and predictability'. ITASE also has linkages to the GLOCHANT programme on Ice Sheet Mass Balance and Sea Level contributions (ISMASS) by providing updated spatial accumulation data. It is also closely linked to the GLOCHANT and PAGES Paleoenvironments from Ice Cores (PICE) programme by providing both spatial coverage and short time series on proxy paleoclimatic and environmental parameters, to each of the major deep ice core drilling projects being conducted or recently completed by Italy, France, Germany, United Kingdom, Norway, Sweden (European Ice Coring Initiative in Antarctica, EPICA), Japan, Australia and the US National Science Foundation (NSF) West Antarctic Ice Sheet (WAISCORES) project. Snow chemistry data will be input to the SCAR Biological Investigations of Terrestrial Antarctic Ecosystems (BIOTAS) programme. There are also numerous national linkages to remote sensing projects and to meteorological observing projects.