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The U.S. National Science Foundation is sponsoring a workshop related to data visualization in the Polar Sciences. The workshop will focus on bridging the cyberinfrastructure/data visualization and polar communities and it is scheduled to be held in New York City at the Parsons New School for Design November 3-4, 2014.

Improving the use and the value of existing datasets over the Polar Regions is crucial to promote science and support new discoveries. Ultimately, collaborations between data visualization experts and Polar scientists will foster a greater understanding of the spatiotemporal dynamics at play in Polar Regions and their implications to society.

The participants will be motivated by several public Polar datasets that will made available before the starting date of the workshop. One of the expected outcomes of the workshop is to produce high impact novel prototypes and data visualizations that will be made available under open source licenses. Releasing the prototypes will allow the NSF to make longer-term investments in technologies and visualizations that can be adopted by the community. The workshop will also increase cross agency collaboration between NSF, NASA, NOAA and other Polar-related agencies. The organizing committee is composed by both cyberinfrastructure and Polar experts, including participation from academia, industry, federally funded research and development centers, and from the broader open source community.

The workshop will:

(1) recommend several sets of open source software for data and metadata processing; scientific workflow management; data curation; and data dissemination;
(2) identify some relevant Polar data visualization techniques and assess the needs and challenges of visualizing Polar datasets;
(3) package, deliver, and make available the outcomes of the workshop via a public website; and;
(4) provide input to the NSF Polar CyberInfrastructure program officer through a final report.

Travel support is available for around twenty-five workshop participants that will be selected meritocratically based on interest and based on recommendations from the community.

An organizing committee for the meeting is being formed, with current membership listed below:

• Dr. Chris Mattmann, University of Southern California & Jet Propulsion Laboratory, California Institute of Technology
• Dr. Annie Bryant Burgess, University of Southern California
• Dr. Suzanne Carbotte, Columbia University
• Dr. Bruce Caron, New Media Research Institute
• Dr. Patrick Driscoll, Aalborg University
• Mr. Christopher Goranson, Parsons Institute for Information Mapping
• Mr. Aaron Hill, Parsons New School for Public Engagement
• Dr. Daniel Katz, National Science Foundation
• Dr. Martin Lehmanm, Aalborg University
• Dr. Alan Maceachren, Penn State University
• Dr. Jonathan Pundsack, University of Minnesota Polar Geospatial Center
• Dr. Marco Tedesco, National Science Foundation
• Mr. Joel Towers, Parsons New School
• Dr. Saskia Van Manen, Open University
• Dr. Alexander Lex, Harvard

Datasets for the workshop will be made publicly available via the Cloud to workshop participants around two-weeks prior to the start of the workshop. The workshop format will consist of a 2-day series of invited speakers in Polar Sciences and CyberInfrastructure and Data Visualization to motivate the start of the art and challenges to the community. Four interactive "hackathons" will provide the opportunity for workshop participants to break off into teams and develop novel data visualizations on the provided Cloud datasets. Hackathon results will be shared and disseminated during the workshop read out and will be made available to the community under permissive open source licenses (e.g., the Apache License, version 2).

Please reserve the dates in your calendars and we welcome your inquiries about the workshop. Please send email to the workshop committee at the following address and we will respond promptly to your inquiries: nsfdatavis [at] gmail.com.

We are pleased to announce the 8th Graduate Climate Conference, which will be held October 31-November 2, 2014 at the University of Washington Pack Forest Conference Center.

The goal of this graduate student-organized conference is to assemble a broad range of talks and posters featuring high-quality student research focused on past, present, and future climate change and its impacts. We encourage students at all stages of their graduate career to apply and we seek abstracts on climate research from a variety of disciplines from the physical, natural, and social sciences and humanities, including: oceanography, atmospheric sciences, biology, geosciences, environmental sciences, engineering, geography, public policy, economics, law, ethics, and anthropology.

The abstract submission period opens April 14 and closes June 1. Lodging and meals are covered for all participants. Limited travel funding is also available. Please see our website for more information and for submitting abstracts.

The Arctic Circle is nonprofit and nonpartisan. Organizations, forums, think tanks, corporations and public associations around the world are invited to hold meetings within the Arctic Circle platform to advance their own missions and the broader goal of increasing collaborative decision-making without surrendering their institutional independence.

The Arctic Circle is designed to increase participation in Arctic dialogue and strengthen the international focus on the future of the Arctic. Participating organizations will maintain their full institutional independence, identity and decision-making abilities. To this end, the Arctic Circle aims to create opportunities for everyone to attend different meetings, conduct their own networking and engage in one-on-one informal discussions. Organizations will be able to decide their own agendas and convene their own meetings.

The Arctic Circle will organize sessions on a variety of issues, such as:

• Sea ice melt and extreme weather
• Polar law: treaties and agreements
• The role and rights of indigenous peoples
• Security in the Arctic
• Shipping and transportation infrastructure
• The prospects and risks of oil and gas drilling
• Clean energy achievements and sustainable development
• Arctic resources
• Business cooperation in the Arctic
• The role of Asian and European countries in the Arctic
• Greenland in the new Arctic
• Fisheries and ecosystem management
• The science of ice: global research cooperation
• Arctic tourism
• The ice-dependent world: the Arctic and the Himalayas

It is our great pleasure to host the next IGS Nordic Branch meeting in Iceland and hereby invite you all to participate. The meeting will be held between October 30th and November 1st at Hotel Dyrholaey (http://www.dyrholaey.is) which is located in the vicinity of Myrdalsjökulll ice cap covering the legendary volcano Katla in Southern Iceland (http://osm.org/go/e0wtWw?m=).

The Institute of Earth Sciences, University of Iceland (http://earthice.hi.is/ ) together with the Icelandic Meteorological Office (http://en.vedur.is/) will host this meeting which will provide great opportunities for scientists and students in glaciology and related topics to present their latest results in relaxed, informal atmosphere. Participants will also have the opportunity to go on an exciting field excursion in the vicinity of the Myrdalsjökull and Eyjafjallajökull ice caps on November 2nd.

This series of three workshops will include presentations and discussions of how coastal erosion on the North Slope of Alaska impacts local communities, potential responses to those impacts, related cultural and economic factors, and best practices for a long-term observing (LTO) network that could contribute to community planning and response.

Speakers for this webinar include:

• Orson Smith from AVTEC, University of Alaska Anchorage (retired), speaking on monitoring network fundamentals.
• Nicole Kinsman from Alaska Division of Geological and Geophysical Surveys, speaking on online monitoring tools.

General questions for discussion:
1. What are the best practices for a long-term observing network so that it contributes to community understanding and planned response to coastal erosion?
2. What are the best strategies for informing and engaging the community?

For more information, please contact Kathleen Fischer at kmbfischer [at] comcast.net.

The conference on Gender Equality in the Arctic will broadly focus on the living condition of women and men throughout the Circumpolar North, addressing key issues such as access to and control over resources, representation in decision-making positions, political participation, regional development, human security, and material and cultural well-being. The purpose is to promote extensive, policy-relevant dialogue on gender equality issues in terms of current realities and future challenges and in the context of climatic and environmental changes and economic and social development.

Themes and topics will be divided into the following plenaries:

• Gender Equality and the Arctic: Current Realities, Future Challenges
• Political Representation and Participation in Decision-making: Gendered Dimensions
• Regional Socio-Economic Development and its Gendered Impacts
• Climate and Environmental Change, Natural Resource Development, and Gender
• Human Security: Gendered Aspects
• Human Capital and Gender: Migration, Mobility, Education and Adaptation
• (Re-)Construction of Gender in the Arctic

Sessions will consist of three brief presentations in addition to panelist contributions with questions and answers.

Speakers:
Information concerning confirmed speakers and panelists can be found on the conference page.

Early Bird Registration:
Early bird registration of 150 USD for the full program and conference dinner until 5 October 2014.

The conference is sponsored by the Ministry for Foreign Affairs of Iceland, the Icelandic Government’s Equality Action Fund, the Foreign Ministry of Sweden, the Nordic Cooperation Committee and the Nordic Council of Ministers for Gender Equality (MR-JÄM).

The Institute for Marine and Antarctic Studies is proud to join the Polar Law Institute and the University of Akureyri in Iceland, the Northern Institute for Environmental and Minority Law, Arctic Centre, University of Lapland, the University of the Arctic, and the Arctic Law Thematic Network in Finland in hosting the 7th Polar Law Symposium in Hobart in 2014. This will be the first time the event has been held in the Southern Hemisphere. Its theme explores, among other things, the interests of Asian states in both the Arctic and the Antarctic. We now welcome 200-word abstracts from speakers interested in topics in two parts of the program: legal and political commentary and scientific research and logistics.

In order to celebrate its 40th anniversary, Association Inuksiutiit Katimajiit Inc., in collaboration with Université Laval, is glad to invite you to the 19th edition of the biennial Inuit Studies Conference. It will be held in Quebec City, October 29 - November 1, 2014, the theme of the meeting being Qaumaniq: Enlightening Knowledge. Confined for a long time to the status of objects of science, Inuit have now become important actors and active participants in arctic research. Their participation can take several shapes: sharing knowledge, identifying and defining research questions, acting as researchers and authors, etc. Moreover, Inuit knowledge is now giving form to scientific discourse. Formerly considered as mere stories whose interest was purely ethnological, Inuit descriptions and explanations of their environment are now valorized because of their richness, their deep-reaching understanding, and their precision. The organizers invite you to explore Inuit contributions to contemporary learning, by proposing a reflection on Inuit knowledge, scientific knowledge, and the often complex links between the two. This conference constitutes an excellent occasion to examine how knowledge is shared between researchers and Inuit, what is the impact of Inuit knowledge on scientific learning (and vice versa), what types of relations exist between researchers and Inuit during and after fieldwork, and how Inuit approach, perceive, and contribute to research.

The National Aeronautics and Space Administration and the Indian Space Research Organisation are planning a synthetic aperture radar (SAR) mission for launch in 2020. The mission is a dual L- and S-band polarimetric SAR satellite with a 12-day interferometric orbit that will provide systematic global coverage. Its primary science objectives are to: measure solid Earth surface deformation (earthquakes, volcanic unrest, land subsidence/uplift, landslides); track and understand cryosphere dynamics (glaciers, ice sheets, sea ice, and permafrost); characterize and track changes in vegetation structure and wetlands for understanding ecosystem dynamics and carbon cycle; and support global disaster response. In addition, the planned dense spatial and temporal sampling can support a host of additional science objectives and end-user applications.

We seek community input to develop a mission that most fully exploits its potential to serve the broadest possible user base. To that end, the project will host an applications workshop to a) inform the applications and end user communities about the mission; b) to solicit feedback on mission design elements; c) to explore new applications research directions; d) identify high-value products; and e) search for collaborative opportunities. Invited presentations will highlight potential applied science areas with SAR, both currently considered mature and those possibly advanced by the mission. Examples include agriculture, water and energy resources, disasters and infrastructure monitoring, sea ice and coastal oceans. Planned breakout sessions and panel discussions will serve to discuss applications community observational needs and data product specifications in greater detail, and how these needs could be met with observations, collection modes, fundamental SAR imaging and derived products. In this workshop we seek to engage the broad science applications and research communities, governmental agencies, developers, and potential users of NISAR data to ensure the mission produces data and products of value to the applications community.

More information will be posted as it becomes available.

This series of three workshops will include presentations and discussions of how coastal erosion on the North Slope of Alaska impacts local communities, potential responses to those impacts, related cultural and economic factors, and best practices for a long-term observing (LTO) network that could contribute to community planning and response. Ann Gibbs of the U.S. Geological Survey will be speaking on regional shoreline changes and coastal erosion hazards.

General questions for discussion:
1. What are the best practices for a long-term observing network so that it contributes to community understanding and planned response to coastal erosion?
2. What are the best strategies for informing and engaging the community?

For more information, please contact Kathleen Fischer at kmbfischer [at] comcast.net.