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WDC for Glaciology, BoulderFacilitating the international exchange of snow and ice data |
WDC Boulder Home WDC Boulder History WDC Boulder Activities WDC Annual Report WDC Boulder Catalog
The history of the WDC for Glaciology, Boulder, begins in 1957, when a special committee of the International Council of Scientific Unions (ICSU) sponsored the International Geophysical Year (IGY). The IGY was an antecedent of the First (1882-1883) and Second (1932-1933) International Polar Years: two groundbreaking examples of international cooperation in geophysical research. The United States IGY committee, fearing that newly acquired data would not be archived properly and would be difficult to access in the future, called for the orderly preservation of IGY data. In 1957, only three months before the official beginning of the IGY, an IGY guide for data exchange was developed and World Data Centers were established in several countries. The free exchange of data through the WDC system during and after the IGY proved to be enormously successful from the point of view of geophysicists. As a result, ICSU recommended continuing the operation of the WDCs.
The WDC for Glaciology was established at the American Geographical Society in New York under the directorship of William O. Field. The American Geographical Society already had a large collection of glaciological data and glacier photographs, and data from IGY were quickly added. A new publication, Glaciological Notes, listed data acquisitions and shared news in glaciology and related fields. After IGY, the National Science Foundation took on funding the WDC for Glaciology, but with a very tight budget. In 1969 it became clear that the American Geographical Society could not continue to support the WDC for Glaciology, even though the National Academy of Science's Committee on Polar Research recognized that the continuation of the WDC was an urgent matter. Arrangements were made to transfer the operation of the data center to the United States Geological Survey (USGS), where the center could operate with stable funding. From 1971 to 1976, the WDC for Glaciology was located at the USGS office in Tacoma, Washington, under the directorship of Mark F. Meier.
As the importance of glaciers in hydrology became more widely recognized, interest in glacier data grew. In 1976, the responsibility for the WDC for Glaciology was transferred from USGS to NOAA. The Polar Research Board's Committee on Glaciology suggested moving the Center to the University of Colorado, where it would be operated by the Institute for Arctic and Alpine Research (INSTAAR) and in close proximity to the NOAA National Geophysical Data Center (NGDC). The WDC for Glaciology began operation in Boulder in 1976 under the directorship of Roger Barry. Over the first decade of operation in Boulder, new problems in data management related to the advent of satellite data and a burgeoning interest of the scientific community in sea ice and snow broadened the scope of the Center well beyond glaciers. The Glaciological Data publication series was instituted and a New Accessions List of additions to the library and data archive was circulated regularly. In 1981, the WDC responsibility was transferred to the Cooperative Institute for Research in Environmental Sciences, in association with Roger Barry's new academic affiliation.
NOAA was, and continues to be, a major funding source for the WDC for Glaciology, Boulder. In 1982, NOAA's data service (now the National Environmental Satellite, Data, and Information Service) designated the cryospheric data management activities in Boulder a National Snow and Ice Data Center. A range of funding agencies supports NSIDC. While the names "National Snow and Ice Data Center" and "WDC for Glaciology, Boulder" are sometimes used interchangeably, the WDC for Glaciology, Boulder, designation properly applies only to NSIDC's Information Center holdings (books, periodicals, and analog data) and to certain data sets.
The WDC for Glaciology, Boulder is NSIDC's international identity, and we hope to strengthen this identity through further involvement in international programs such as the International Geosphere Biosphere Project and the World Climate Research Program's Arctic Climate System Study projects. More information on the history of the WDC for Glaciology, Boulder, can be found in the WDC publication Glaciological Data, Report GD-19, ISSN 0149-1776, October 1987.
Formally, the term "glaciology" includes all aspects of snow and ice, but until 1999, the WDC for Glaciology, Boulder, appended "Snow and Ice" to the name in order to prevent the misunderstanding that we were concerned only with glacier data. Now, however, we are generally identified as the National Snow and Ice Data Center. Our secondary identity as a World Data Center is well known to cryospheric researchers. This evolution allowed us to drop "Snow and Ice" from the WDC name. The name was changed again in 1999 to remove the letter designation "WDC-A for Glaciology" that originally corresponded to a geographical grouping of the World Data Centers.
