As described in this month’s newsletter No 7, the Programme for Monitoring of the Greenland Ice Sheet (PROMICE) is nearing completion of its comprehensive database of surface mass budget observations from the Greenland ice sheet melt area and peripheral glaciers. We now have just over 2400 unique observations spanning from the 1938 Freja Glacier expedition to the present. Approximately half these observations have never been published. These historic measurements were fragmented across studies, most of which were pre-digital or unpublished, effectively making this highly valuable data inaccessible to the global research community. Despite our best efforts, however, we are still missing data from a handful of known expeditions. For example, does someone you know perhaps have a copy of Alfred Wegener’s 1930 Qaamarujuk Glacier observations? There is a chance we might even be unaware of some expeditions, especially recent private sector prospecting work. Please get in touch with Horst Machguth (homac@byg.dtu.dk) of the www.promice.dk team if you can help us out with this community data assimilation project!
Map of the location, with temporal description, of the Greenland ice sheet melt area and local glacier surface mass budget observations presently contained in the database. The grey sites are the missing data (from a manuscript in preparation).
