Glacial Assessment: Past, Present and Future: Acquisition of Essential Research Instrumentation

The NSF OPP award # 0321053 supported a Major Research Instrumentation (MRI)
purchase of equipment for Ohio State University's Glacial Assessment Program
(GAP). The program has three major thrusts: 1) documenting ongoing and recent
glacier change primarily using geophysical methods including remote sensing; 2)
assessing the recent changes from a long-term perspective provided by
high-resolution ice core-derived climate histories; and 3) projecting future
glacier changes by improving modeling capability, and hence, predicting future
climate forcing in terms of snowfall and ablation.

Acquisition of these instruments contributes to the Glacial Assessment
Program's ability to investigate glacier changes in the past, present and
future by enhancing OSU's technical capability to make critical observations
and analyses. More specifically, the spectroradiometer allows crucial field
observations of the spectral signature of periglacial landscapes, in order to
serve as validation for trimline mapping using multispectral satellite imagery.
The gravity meter is essential to make a more quantitative assessment of the
mass balances of Greenland, Antarctica and smaller glaciers and ice caps that
strongly control present and future sea level fluctuations. The mass
spectrometer and ion chromatographs provide critical augmentation to OSU's
capability to reconstruct past climate variability from ice cores recovered
from glaciers and ice caps from the equator to the poles and thereby
disentangle the various mechanisms forcing regional climates in the past.

Finally, computer clusters allow better prediction of future climate change via
the development of higher resolution simulations of regional climate.