The International Symposium on the Verification of Cryospheric Models was organized by the International Glaciological Society and held at the Swiss Federal Institute for Technology, Zurich, Switzerland, from 16-20 August 1999.
Overall organization was the responsibility of the International Glaciological Society in Cambridge, under the direction of C. Simon L. Ommanney. Local arrangements were made by a committee headed by Atsumu Ohmura, that included Heinz Blatter, Martin Funk, Wilfried Haeberli, Walter Ammann and Heinz Gaggeler.
The symposium was co-sponsored by the EidgenossischeTechnische Hochschule (ETH) Zurich and the Universitat Zurich. Financial support for the symposium was provided by the Schweizerische Akademie fur Naturwissenschaften and the Schweizerische Stiftung fur Alpine Forschungen.
There were 151 participants from 18 countries, with 119 papers presented; 65 as oral presentations and 54 as posters. Many of the papers were submitted for publication in this volume. The chief editor was Konrad Steffen from the University of Colorado Boulder, and the team of specialist Associate Editors covering the broad range of topics included in the symposium comprised Roger G. Barry, Garry K.C. Clarke, Paul Fohn , G. Hilmar Gudmundsson, Adrian Jenkins, Michael Kuhn, Peter Lemke, Shinji Mae, CornelisJ. van der Veen and Jay Zwally.
The Symposium was dedicated to the memory of Fritz Muller, a Swiss and Canadian glaciologist who died prematurely in 1980. After working on pingos in Greenland and the Mackenzie Delta, Canada, he investigated the glaciers of the Mount Everest region before taking a position at McGill University, Montreal, Canada. From there he organized a major interdisciplinary glaciological project on Axel Heiberg Island, Nunavut; the subject of a paper in this volume by W. P. Adams. His project on mass and energy exchanges in the North Water, at the head of Baffin Bay, was already underway when he returned to Switzerland to become head of the Geographisches Institut of ETH, Zurich. He died whilst leading a field excursion to Rhonegletscher. Several papers in this volume were prepared especially for this memorial.
