Major Activities
The IPA coordinates and cooperates with several other major international programmes and organizations. Briefly these are:
Global Terrestrial Network for Permafrost (GTN-P) is a WMO network for monitoring of the active layer and the Thermal State of Permafrost (TSP). The IPA manages the GTN-P. The Circumpolar Active Layer Monitoring (CALM) program has 125 reporting stations and TSP has identified over 800 boreholes; both include a total of over 15 participating countries.
Arctic Coastal Dynamics (ACD) is a joint programme with the International Arctic Science Committee (IASC) and the IGBP(International Geosphere-Biosphere Programme) - LOICZ (Land-Ocean Interactions in the Coastal Zone) programme to estimate the organic carbon content and mineral transfer for eroding permafrost onto the Arctic shelves. The IPA is collaborating with the International Union for Quaternary Research (INQUA).
The IPA has a Memorandum of Understanding with the Climate and Cryosphere (CliC) programme of the World Climate Research Programme (WCRP). The main areas of cooperation are on the roles of permafrost on water and carbon balances, and data assimilation and modelling.
Beginning in 1995 the IPA and the International Geographical Union (IGU) developed an Agreement of Cooperation, thus making IPA an affiliate of the IGU. The current IGU collaboration is within its Commission on Cold Regions Environments.
Coordination of activities on permafrost, soils and periglacial environments of the Antarctic and sub-Antarctic islands is a joint programme with an Expert Group of the Scientific Committee for Antarctic Research (SCAR).
Activities related to glaciers and permafrost hazards in the high mountains (GAPHAZ) are a joint activity with the International Union of Geodesy and Geophysics (IUGG) and its newly designated Commission for the Cryospheric Sciences.
The topic of carbon sources and sinks in cold regions soils (cryosols) and permafrost is a joint program with the Global Carbon Project (GPC) and the joint working group on Cryosol of the International Union of Soil Sciences (IUSS).
Read more about this topic: International Permafrost Association
Famous quotes containing the words major and/or activities:
“Seeing our common-sense conceptual framework for mental phenomena as a theory brings a simple and unifying organization to most of the major topics in the philosophy of mind.”
—Paul M. Churchland (b. 1942)
“Both gossip and joking are intrinsically valuable activities. Both are essentially social activities that strengthen interpersonal bonds—we do not tell jokes and gossip to ourselves. As popular activities that evade social restrictions, they often refer to topics that are inaccessible to serious public discussion. Gossip and joking often appear together: when we gossip we usually tell jokes and when we are joking we often gossip as well.”
—Aaron Ben-Ze’Ev, Israeli philosopher. “The Vindication of Gossip,” Good Gossip, University Press of Kansas (1994)