January 20001.  Reports tentatively scheduled for release by the US National Research Council during January 2001:

• Enhancing NASA's Contributions to Polar Science: A Review of Polar Geophysical Data Sets.  Advises NASA on ways to improve the data that its satellites collect over the Earth's polar regions and make them more useful to scientists studying climate variability in the cryosphere -- the portion of the planet where water is perennially frozen, making it particularly sensitive to climate change.
• Improving the Effectiveness of U.S. Climate Modeling.  Assesses the nation's technical needs in the field of climate modeling and recommends ways for federal agencies and the scientific community to tap the country's best modeling talent.
• Under the Weather: Exploring the Linkages Among Climate, Ecosystems, and Infectious Disease. Reviews the connections between climate variations and the transmission of infectious diseases, and examines the potential for establishing early warning systems to detect when climate variability may lead to the spread of disease.

14-19 January 2001.  Albuquerque, New Mexico.  81st American Meteorological Society (AMS) Annual Meeting.  Contact: AMS, Meetings Department, 45 Beacon Street, Boston, MA 02108-3693.  Tel: +1 617 227 2425.  Fax: +1 617 742 8718.  E-mail: amsinfo@ametsoc.org.  Web: www.ametsoc.org/AMS/meet/81annual/81annual_right.html.

17-20 January 2001. Shanghai, China.  Eighth Session of Working Group I of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.  Contact: N. Sundararaman, Secretary to the IPCC, Geneva, Switzerland.  Tel: +41 22 730 8208.  Fax: +41 22 730 8025.  Web: www.ipcc.ch

22 January - 2 February 2001.  University of Cape Town, South Africa.  Southern Africa Workshop on Regional Climate Modeling.  Web: www.egs.uct.ac.za/workshops/mm5/. 

25-27 January 2001.  Leuven (near Brussels), Belgium.  Living Knowledge: Building Partnerships for Public Access  to Research.  "An International Conference on Science Shops."  Web: http://www.bio.uu.nl/living-knowledge/confinfo1.html.

29-31 January 2001.  Broomfield, Colorado. Meeting of the Department of Energy's Atmospheric Radiation Measurement Program, Cloud Properties Working Group.  The purpose of the meeting is to coordinate cloud research activities within ARM, identify new cloud retrieval algorithms, and interface with the users of cloud data. Discussions will include the latest technological advances in cloud measurement, techniques for the retrieval of the microphysical structure of clouds, and the development of long term cloud statistics at the ARM CART sites. For more information, contact Mark Miller.