and
GE6 DOCUMENTS
There were many contributions to GE6 in May, and it has taken me a long time to get them into some kind of order and into a web directory, but I hope that some of them at least will be of interest to you. They include:
Chairman's report to GE6
PSMSL report to GE6
University of Hawaii Sea Level Center report
WOCE Sea Level Centres report
IOC-UNEP-WMO Pilot Activity in the Indian Ocean
Proposed Sea level and Storm Surge Observing System for the
Northern Indian Ocean
Asia-Pacific Space Geodynamics report
Caribbean network report
Global Undersea Bottom Pressures proposal
and national reports including:
National Report of France
National Report of the UK
National Report of Nigeria
National Report of Cote d'Ivoire
National Report of Romania
National Report of South Africa
Report on Tema tide gauge (Ghana)
In addition, if you Click here you will find a directory containing a number of files in Word (*.doc), or Rich Text Format (*.rtf) concerned with countries of the Western Indian Ocean:
Kenya.doc National reports (some incomplete) Madagascar.doc .. Mauritius.doc .. Mozambique.rtf .. (to be updated?) Seychelles.doc .. Tanzania.doc .. (to be updated?)Then, if you Click here you can transfer the following files in Word or Postscript (*.ps) or PDF formats:
arctic.ps Arctic network report (draft version) carib.doc Caribbean network report (larger version)GLOSS EXPERTS ACTIONS LIST
uruguay.doc National report of Uruguay uruguay.pdf ..
GLOSS Experts meetings tend to produce a long list of actions to be undertaken in the months following. The GE5 meeting at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in 1997 had produced a list called:
which was reviewed at the GE6 meeting. This was subsequently replaced at GE6 by a new list called:
which must be acted upon as soon as possible.
GLOSS EXPERTS RECOMMENDATIONS
GLOSS Experts meetings also tend to produce a number of recommendations which go to the IOC Assembly for approval. The recommendations from GE6 can be seen in the documents 'ge6rep.wpd' or 'ge6rep.text' (see below). All the recommendations were approved by the Assembly in July.
FORMAL REPORTS
You can check out some of the formal reports stemming from or contributed to the meetings of the past few months by Clicking here:
ge6rep.wpd Report of the GE6 meeting (Wordperfect format)
ge6rep.text ditto in Ascii text
assem99.rtf Report on GLOSS submitted to the IOC Assembly July 1999
jcom1.doc Report on GLOSS submitted to JCOMMTRAN-1 July 1999
cmslt-rep99.doc Report of the IAPSO CMSLT at Birmingham IUGG 1999
(by the President Dr.Christian Le Provost)
In addition, you can inspect the
PSMSL 4 year Report to the IUGG. TRAINING
Training, and provision of new training materials, looks like being a major issue for the next year.
PSMSL Training Page
The PSMSL has recently constructed a prototype training page at
http://www.pol.ac.uk/psmsl/training/training.html
on which suggestions for additional software, reports etc. would be welcome. There must be many such sets of materials already available. At the GE6 meeting in May it was decided to rewrite the now rather old IOC tide gauge training manuals. We hope that that can be done in 1999 but in the meantime the old ones are included in this page.
At the end of the page you can click to another page listing suppliers of tide gauge hardware. This is an updated version of the pages in the old manuals. Please suggest additions.
Some people may be familiar with the web pages of the Bureau Gravimetrique International (http://bgi.cnes.fr:8110) which is a FAGS service like the PSMSL. The BGI pages contain a number of training documents on background science and it occurred to me that we should maybe ask experts within the sea level community to do something similar i.e. to write chapters of a 'book on the web' on aspects of science such as tides, extremes, MSL long term changes (e.g. climate and IPCC), land movements, ENSO, meteorological and ocean circulation effects on sea level, altimetry, coastal processes etc. Of course, there are text books on these things (e.g. David Pugh's book) but they tend to be very expensive. Therefore, what is your opinion on asking a set of people to write such things? Have you ideas for 'volunteers', timescales, other headings and possible referees?
It is possible that such material may already exist in other forms (e.g. university lecture notes on paper) which is not subject to copyright and which we could scan in. Please let me know if so. Anyone who does any work along these lines will get the full credit.
ICTP and TWAS Possibilities
Eduardo Marone reported at GE6, and later sent me a lot of information, on training and research opportunites available to the individual or to a programme such such as GLOSS through the
both in Trieste.
In addition, the TWAS (twas@ictp.trieste.it) provides grants for scientific meetings, 'South-South Fellowships', grants for joint research projects and spare parts for scientific equipment (not computers), collaborative lectureship schemes, postgraduate schemes for women in science etc.
I strongly encourage GLOSS people in developing countries, and especially the Regional Coordinators, to ask for information on these programmes and follow them up. I am sure that where people take the initiative in this way that IOC and the GLOSS community in general will support them.
AND FINALLY ...
At the time of writing last minute plans are being put in place for a further GLOSS training course at the University of Sao Paulo in August-September organised by Afranio de Mesquita and with guest lecturers Trevor Baker and Ian Vassie from POL. Afranio also does an excellent job producing the Afro-America GLOSS News which, following the GE6 meeting, will soon become a joint Brazil-South African publication on the web co-edited by the University of Cape Town.
As this will almost certainly be the only issue of the Bulletin in 1999, best wishes in advance from me for the Millennium.
Philip Woodworth plw@pol.ac.uk