Editorial to Issue 4 (November 1996)

Welcome to the fourth issue of the GLOSS Bulletin, or perhaps it should just be issue '3 and a bit' as it is just this editorial and little else. I am afraid that I have not been able to put in the time to arm-twist people into preparing material for a proper fourth issue. I intend to do that early next year. On the other hand, I didn't want these twice-yearly GLOSS communications to miss a beat. Hence, this reduced edition.

Meetings

Part of the reason for 1996 having evaporated so fast has been the large number of interesting, and GLOSS-related, meetings recently. Amongst the most notable was Tidal Science 1996 at the Royal Society in London on 21-22 October. That meeting, held on the 70th birthday of Dr.David Cartwright FRS, consisted of a large number of excellent talks and posters on the present status of different aspects of tidal research, with many of the presentations to be written up for a special issue of Progress in Oceanography .

Tidal Science 1996 was followed by a meeting of the TOPEX/POSEIDON Science Working Team at the new Southampton Oceanography Centre. One aspect of recent T/P research which is of interest to GLOSS is the fact that the widely-circulated, anomalously large rate of rise of global sea level reported in T/P data has been found to be a result of data errors. Global sea level change during the 4 years of the mission is now reported to be consistent with zero. The meeting was also of interest in stressing the symbiosis which is now taking place between altimeter and tide gauge recording, with altimetry now relying on tide gauges to a great extent for ongoing calibration.

Two important GLOSS-related meetings will take place in the next few weeks in South America. An IOC GLOSS training course on sea level and related topics will be held during the second half of November in Buenos Aires, Argentina. That will be followed by a large Symposium on Oceanography, with sessions devoted to GLOSS, at the Insituto Oceanografico of the University of Sao Paulo, Brazil during the first week of December. The Symposium will mark the 50th anniversary of the IOUSP.

GLOSS Status October 1996

People familiar with GLOSS's history will know that we review the status of the project every October. This year the status is better than in any previous year. Details can be found by jumping to:

http://www.pol.ac.uk/psmsl/status_oct96.html.

GLOSS Implementation Plan 1997

The major task prior to a meeting of the GLOSS Group of Experts in March 1997 is to compose the new version of the GLOSS Implementation Plan, in order to replace the old one from 1990. Anyone interested in GLOSS is invited to inspect the latest draft version of the new Plan, which can be obtained via ftp as follows:

ftp to bisag.nbi.ac.uk
cd pub/general/plw/gip
get doc1.html (which is the main text of the Plan)
get doc2.html (which contains the Annexes)
get the figures which are mostly Postscript files.

At the top of 'doc1.html' you will see a note that this version is not yet complete, but it will be the last version before the end of the year, and your comments will be certainly appreciated.

GLOSS Station Handbook CD-ROM

All official IOC GLOSS Contacts should have received a copy of the GLOSS Station Handbook CD-ROM sometime around September. If you have not received one and would like one, let us know. This version of the Handbook, prepared by the British Oceanographic Data Centre (Meirion Jones, Lesley Rickards and Andy Tabor) on behalf of IOC and the PSMSL, contains much more expanded information than we could put on the former floppy disk product. For example, we have included site maps for as many GLOSS sites as possible.

Best wishes for the Christmas holidays and for 1997.

Philip Woodworth plw@pol.ac.uk