On 16–18 June 2008 the US National Snow and Ice Data Center held a GLIMS workshop in Boulder, CO, USA, focusing on formulating procedures and best practices for operational glacier mapping using satellite imagery. Despite the progress made in recent years, there still remain many cases where automatic delineation of glacier boundaries in satellite imagery is difficult, error prone or time-consuming. This workshop identified six themes for consideration by focus groups: (1) mapping clean ice and lakes; (2) mapping ice divides; (3) mapping debris-covered glaciers; (4) assessing changes in glacier area and elevation through comparisons with older data; (5) digital elevation model (DEM) generation from satellite stereo pairs; and (6) accuracy and error analysis. Talks presented examples and work in progress for each of these topics, and focus groups worked on compiling a summary of available algorithms and procedures to address and avoid identified hurdles. Special emphasis was given to establishing standard protocols for glacier delineation and analysis, creating illustrated tutorials and providing source code for available methods. This paper summarizes the major results of the 2008 GLIMS workshop, with an emphasis on definitions, methods and recommendations for satellite data processing. While the list of proposed methods and recommendations is not comprehensive and is still a work in progress, our goal here is to provide a starting point for the GLIMS regional centers as well as for the wider glaciological community in terms of documentation on possible pitfalls along with potential solutions.

Whitt et al. Future of Autonomous Ocean Observations reductions. Cost reductions could enable order-of-magnitude increases in platform operations and increase sampling resolution for a given level of investment. Energy harvesting technologies should be integral to the system design, for sensors, platforms, vehicles, and docking stations. Connections are needed between the marine energy and ocean observing communities to coordinate among funding sources, researchers, and end users. Regional teams should work with global organizations such as IOC/GOOS in governance development. International networks such as emerging glider operations (EGO) should also provide a forum for addressing governance. Networks of multiple vehicles can improve operational efficiencies and transform operational patterns. There is a need to develop operational architectures at regional and global scales to provide a backbone for active networking of autonomous platforms.

The Global Land Ice Measurement from Space (GLIMS) project is a cooperative effort of over sixty institutions world-wide with the goal of inventorying a majority of the world's estimated 160 000 glaciers. Data sent from Regional Center analysts to the GLIMS team at the National Snow and Ice Data Center (NSIDC) in Boulder, Colorado are inserted into a geospatial database. The GLIMS Glacier Database now contains outlines of over 58 000 glaciers. As submissions to the database from all over the world increase, we find that we must accommodate a greater diversity in the character and quality of the data submitted than was originally anticipated. We present an overview of the current glacier outline inventory, and examine issues related to data coverage, and data quality. A significant achievement of the GLIMS project is that the database and interfaces to it, as well as the GLIMSView tool, provided to help in the production of GLIMS analyses, are all built from open source software.Issues we've dealt with to achieve a high-quality glacier database include: 1. data submitted without proper metadata; 2. data submitted with incorrect georegistration; 3. varying analyst interpretations of what exactly constitutes a glacier; 4. arbitrary termination of glacier boundaries at political boundaries; 5. arbitrary termination of glacier boundaries at edges of available satellite images.

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