Palmer LTER Site Flash (Oct96) - Karen Baker, PAL datamanager

The sixth field season from November96 to March97 begins this week at
Palmer Station and plans have begun for our fifth annual January cruise.  
A new satellite link to Palmer station provides two 3-hr windows of 
internet connetivity.  This new connectivity will change our research 
effort in several important ways including improved logistic support
and more timely help with equipment repair as well as near real time data 
analysis and archiving.  FTP from the field is planned as a daily activity 
this season.  In fact, the addition of a 9GB disk for LTER data storage is 
timely.  This season will be unique in that an NSF sponsored educational 
activity 'Live from Antarctica' will be at Palmer Station during the 
LTER season and cruise.  This program creates school curriculum
materials and links schools with field researchers. Investigators are
currently exploring the possibility of scheduling a visit on the January 97
cruise to visit the British Antarctic Station at Rothera, which is South of 
Palmer Station, in order to co-ordinate with a new time-series effort 
beginning at the British station this season.  A data manager from BAS 
(Claire Swanson) and from Palmer LTER (Karen Baker) both submitted 
poster presentations at the Eco Informa Workshop and were able to continue
an exchange of Antarctic program information begun by lead scientists over
the last year.

The format developed for our cruise reports has become an emerging internal
standard for our site and was used for the January96 cruise.  A format was 
also developed to summarize the seasonal station work and used to report the 
USAP 9596 season.  Data synthesis has been promoted by a summary display of 
the annual regional data and a temporal panel of variables collected at the 
inshore stations. The development of protocol descriptions continues. 
The regionalization, biodiversity and climate cross-site lter activities 
received support from data management as did some of the papers submitted
to the site's synthesis volume due out this year.

An initial analysis of satellite sea ice data using image processing
techniques and graphical IDL analysis culminated in calculation
of long term means.  Yearly, monthly and seasonal ice indexes have 
been explored as methods to facilitate use of similar quantitative ice 
timing and magnitude information.  Current historical weather records 
have been synthesized to produce a 22-year monthly mean against which 
ongoing measurements can be compared. Improvements in instrumentation 
and documentation have been initiated.  The two automatic weather stations 
have had battery and transmission difficulties so are scheduled for 
replacement this season.

Our renewal proposal has been accepted.  An addendum modification was 
required adding a new data policy specifying core data to be available 
publically in two years in addition to a time table showing data availability.  
Further, it was required that data be submitted to the National Oceanographic 
Data Center (NODC).  Contact has been initiated with NODC as well as the 
Joint Environmental Data Analysis Center (JEDA) for quality control of 
hydrographic variables and the National office of the Antarctic Data 
Directory (ADDS) for Antarctic metadata.