This month as the days grow much shorter here in Northern Norway, we are happy to welcome some great new energy to the international research projects here in Tromso. Calista Morrison joined the Climate and the Cryosphere office as an intern for the next few months. You can read more about her in the APECS News section of the newsletter and our website. I thought this would provide a great time to tell you more about CliC. CliC and APECS have been working together now for a few years to try to help create opportunities for young researchers involved in not just polar research, but cryosphere projects as well. CliC's International coordination office is located here in Tromsø at the Norwegian Polar Institute.
The CliC Project was established in March 2000 by the World Climate Research Programme* ( WCRP )to stimulate, support, and coordinate research into the processes by which the cryosphere interacts with the rest of the climate system. The cryosphere consists of the frozen portions of the globe, and includes ice sheets, glaciers, ice caps, icebergs, sea ice, snow cover and snowfall, permafrost and seasonally frozen ground, as well as lake- and river-ice. As a sensitive component of the climate system, the cryosphere may provide key indicators of climate change, and CliC will focus on identifying patterns and rates of change in cryospheric parameters. The Scientific Committee on Antarctic Research (SCAR), became a co-sponsor of CliC in 2004. In July 2008, the International Arctic Science Committee (IASC) joined as sponsor when they, together with WCRP and SCAR representatives, signed a Memorandum of Understanding to co-sponsor the CliC project .
The CliC project's principal goal is to assess and quantify the impacts that climate variability and change have on components of the cryosphere and its overall stability, and the consequences of these impacts for the climate system. To attain its goal, CliC develops and coordinates national and international activities related to cryosphere and climate. This includes organizing conferences, workshops, scientific experiments, and model comparison studies, as well as collaboration with other groups involved in climate research. CliC promotes projects to recover, archive, and distribute historic data sets.
