Collaborative Research: Improving research coordination for Summit Station and the Dry-Snow Zone of Greenland

Summit Station (72N, 38W, 3250 m.a.s.l.) hosts the Greenland Environmental Observatory, a cooperation between the National Science Foundation and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration with permission from the Danish Commission for Scientific Research in Greenland to provide long-term environmental measurements. Summit is the only year-round, high-elevation, free-tropospheric, inland environmental observatory in the Arctic, and fills a unique niche in the international scientific community's global observing system. The Summit Station Science Coordination Office is an advisory body that serves the scientific community, the National Science Foundation's Arctic Research Support and Logistics Program and the Arctic Research Support & Logistics Services contractor by making recommendations about ways to accommodate or mitigate conflicting requests from different science teams working at Summit and suggesting ways that projects might reduce their logistical footprint. The Science Coordination Office also suggests science-based priorities for capital investments by the National Science Foundation at Summit. The Science Coordination Office strives to develop a true community of Summit users through open communication and by encouraging shared use of resources and key data sets. It also endeavors to focus the Summit community on the transformative questions identified by the participants at the Summit Station Science Summit in March 2017 and encourages the community to synthesize available data to identify innovative approaches to address these knowledge gaps. The Science Coordination Office advances discovery and understanding of processes acting across the interior of the Greenland Ice Sheet while promoting teaching, training, and learning. New features of the GEO Summit website, aimed specifically at new Principal Investigators, will provide rich web content for interested students and the general public. Over the next three years opportunities to interface with the new Greenland Climate Research Centre in Nuuk and add website content tailored to Greenlandic students and researchers will be actively pursued. The ability to quickly link to content about Summit Station will enable outreach programs by Summit researchers to increase their impact. Much effort in this project will be placed towards encouraging broad dissemination of results to enhance scientific and technical understanding. This will be accomplished by continuing to provide a clearinghouse for accessing Summit data, an extensive Summit bibliography, and a detailed list of planning activities to avoid duplicate collection of data at Summit. The Science Coordination Office will also provide greater visibility to the broader community by chairing sessions at international meetings and hosting data workshops that focus on Greenland.