Palmer LTER Site Flash (Aug97) - Karen Baker, PAL datamanager

The sixth field season from November96 to March97 at Palmer Station 
and the fifth January cruise off the Western Antarctic Peninsula have 
been completed.  As a continuing data management synthesis project, 
the season end summary reports in the form of Antarctic Journal Articles 
have been drafted for both the January97 cruise and the USAP 9697 season.  
Also, field methods have been documented including articles on our 
bio-optical instrument profiler, a Palmer Station zodiac instrumentation,
and the season sampling routine. Field research was explored in the NSF 
sponsored educational activity 'Live from Antarctica' broadcast during the 
season's LTER ship cruise and resulting in an educational video.  

The new satellite link to Palmer station provided two 3-hr per day windows of 
field internet connectivity.  This new connectivity did improve logistic 
support, data analysis and data archive.  FTP from the field as a daily 
activity was time consuming with methods for improvement under development.

The datamanager continues to serve as group historian through creation and 
maintenance of the bibliography, a visions timeline and milestone timelines.  
Meeting preparations for an LTER archeoclimatology meeting followed by a Palmer 
LTER paleohistory workshop this month have finalized.  Preparations for an 
upcoming LTER CC meeting in October hosted at Santa Barbara followed by our 
site steering committee visit have begun with web pages including online 
registration. Participation as an invited speaker in the NSF funded Data and
Information Management Workshop preceding the August97 Albuquerque ESA meeting
includes presentations on a Palmer site data management overview update and 
another on software tools which will include a roundtable discussion.

An analysis of satellite sea ice data, defining sea ice indexes in order 
to make the timing and magnitude of ice events available to all components,
was accepted by Bioscience.  A fuller report using the same analysis but 
including a wide variety of Antarctic regions is in progress.

A web catalog presentation of the online data sets was implemented.  
Development of dynamic web pages provided a low cost method to present 
our hierarchical study and dataset structure.  A non-interactive retrieval 
of documents is performed by a cgi script via www, gopher and ftp servers.  
The study catalog includes study documentation, maps, and participant lists 
in addition to data set documentation and data.  Also, the Palmer LTER home 
page on the www was modified to co-ordinate and highlight selected topics.  
Topics include the bibliography with the Antarctic Research Series book 
preface and synthesis chapters on-line, an overview analysis and impacts 
of ice with annotated bibliography in addition to upcoming meetings with 
agendas and hot links.  The addendum modification to our new proposal 
cycle included a new data policy as required. Each component was assisted in 
meeting the data policy requirement of putting data online within two years 
of study completion.  Summary data tables were created and updated to overview 
progress.  Progress was made on work with the National Oceanographic Data 
Center (NODC) to develop procedures for archiving an online archive making 
use of existing webspiders.