About the Canadian Cryospheric Information Network
The cryosphere - sea ice, lake ice, snow cover, frozen ground and glaciers - plays a significant role in the Earth's climate system. Canada occupies a unique geographic position on the globe: almost half of the planet's northern cryosphere falls within Canada's territorial boundaries. Under the current conditions of rapid climate change over northern high latitudes, Canada has an obligation to measure, model and understand the complex relationships between the cryosphere and the Earth's climate system in order to provide accurate and timely information on cryospheric variability and change to the public and decision makers.
The Canadian Cryospheric Information Network (CCIN) has been developed through a collaborative partnership between the Federal Government (Canadian Space Agency, Environment Canada, Natural Resources Canada), Dr. Ellsworth LeDrew at the University of Waterloo and the private sector (Noetix Research Inc.) over the past decade to provide the data and information management infrastructure for the Canadian cryospheric community. The main objective of the CCIN is to enhance awareness and access to Canadian cryospheric information and related data.
Recently, the Polar Data Catalogue (PDC) has been developed as a 'Discovery Portal' and is also hosted at the University of Waterloo. The PDC website is a metadata repository for arctic researchers. These metadata are the descriptive information about a data set that can be searched to allow others to 'Discover' the existence and characteristics of the data. A geospatial search tool is accessed from the PDC website which allows researchers to discover cryospheric data for a particular region of interest. These cryospheric data sets reside at CCIN as well as on distributed nodes across Canada which can be accessed through the PDC using interoperable standards and technology. The PDC also connects the user to the GeoConnections Discovery Portal (GDP) to access other cryospheric metadata and data internationally. Reciprocally, the PDC can also be accessed from the GDP.
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