University of Colorado at Boulder Professor Konrad Steffen will participate in the United States kickoff event for the International Polar Year at the National Academy of Sciences Auditorium in Washington, D.C., on Feb. 26.
Steffen, director of the Cooperative Institute for Research in Environmental Sciences and an expert on Greenland and the Arctic climate, will be appearing with several other internationally known scientists in a campaign to launch IPY, a two-year research effort involving more than 5,000 scientists from 60 nations studying Earth's frozen regions. The ceremony will be broadcast live on the Web beginning at 8 a.m. MST at .
Other featured speakers include National Science Foundation Director Ardent Bement, National Academy of Sciences President Ralph Cicerone, National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration Administrator Conrad Lautenbacher and U.S. Geological Survey Director Mark Myers. The event also will feature U.S. Arctic Research Commission Chair Mead Treadwell, Senior Research Scientist Robin Bell of the Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory and NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center Chief Scientist Robert Bindschadler.
Steffen has been directing a climate project in Greenland since 1990 known as Swiss Camp that involves CU-Boulder students and researchers and dozens of climate-monitoring stations. Funded by NASA and NSF, the effort includes the automated, hourly collection of temperature and wind data as well as changes in snowpack on the massive ice sheet.
IPY researchers will focus on the Arctic and Antarctic and probe the link between climate change at the poles and rising global temperatures. The issue received heightened attention with the Feb. 2 release of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change's report to policy-makers forecasting rising temperatures and rising seas in the coming decades.
In particular, the IPCC report noted that average Arctic temperatures have increased at almost twice the global average rate over the past 100 years and that melt from the ice sheets of Greenland and Antarctica has contributed to late 20th century sea-level rise, said Steffen.
Steffen and his CIRES colleagues, including researchers at CU-Boulder's National Snow and Ice Data Center, will contribute to IPY through continued monitoring of Arctic climate and sea ice conditions, research on Antarctic ice shelf stability and investigations into the role of trace gases and other air pollutants driving climate change. CIRES scientists also are exploring new technologies to observe the Earth's polar regions, including the use of unmanned aircraft.
CIRES is a joint institute of CU-Boulder and NOAA. For more information about CIRES, please visit cires.colorado.edu.