The Principal Investigator (PI) will will convene the Impurities in snow and Ice Workshop (ISI) in the fall of 2009 in Silverton, Colorado in order to address the urgent need for improved monitoring, modeling, and reconstructions of the climatic and hydrologic effects of impurities in snow and ice cover. Recent research has suggested that the global effects of dust and soot in snow and ice have been underestimated or worse, largely unrealized. Recent publications reveal that radiative forcing by soot in the high latitudes has had significant impacts on the observed warming signal. In addition to global emissions of soot, widespread land use change in the world's desert regions has resulted in stepwise increases in dust emission that in turn are forcing order one month earlier ablation of mid latitude mountain snow cover. With this sudden focus on the implications of changes in impurity deposition to snow and ice surfaces, this focused workshop of the community, and those interested in joining the community, is needed to identify and debate our current understanding, formalize terminology for (i) radiative forcings, (ii) impurity optical properties and (iii) reflectance, reveal modeling inadequacies, consider and draft monitoring and measurement protocols, and establish a roadmap leading to an integrated approach to understanding the spatial and temporal forcings of impurities in the cryosphere at a range of scales.
This workshop will result in the formation of a Snow and Ice Impurities Working Group that will draft protocols for dust and soot measurements in snow, prepare an EOS Meeting Report, and plan a protocol ratification meeting within the coming year. These activities will greatly benefit the broad community of scientists who study dust on snow and those that benefit from such studies, e.g., water managers.
