It’s always nice to kick off a week with notification that a paper you have co-authored has been published.
In this case, and due to a magnificent effort by lead author Gavin Schmidt (who heaven knows must have many other things on his plate at NASA GISS right now), the” Datasets and protocols for including anomalous freshwater from melting ice sheets in climate simulations ” is now out in Geoscientific Model Development.
If that sounds a bit clunky, well it is. The idea is that the paper is a technical guidance, to help climate models (specifically for CMIP7), to include the effects of ice sheets into the earth system, without having to actually include a full ice sheet model, which turns out to be quite hard, particularly in Antarctica.
Even so there’s a lot of general interest in the paper, including how this is usually done now (there are a range of different approaches, each with their quirks). And then a particularly nice and clear section is given on all the many different ways that ice sheets lose ice. The figure below from the paper shows some of these and as they all have different downstream effects on ocean circulation, sea ice and of course sea level rise, it’s important to work out how to include them efficiently. The paper as it stands is a really nice introduction to the subject.
Figure 1 from Schmidt et al., 2025 showing a schematic of how ice sheets lose ice.
Icebergs are particularly interesting as a source, as the meltwater from these can take years to be added to the ocean, in which time, they will have drifted hundreds or thousands of kilometres. We have some suggestions on those too.
In any case, we hope this paper, which grew out of a technical online workshop on the subject, partly organised by our Ocean Ice project, will turn out to be a useful source for the groups that actually run the global climate models for CMIP and the IPCC. Many of these models are still in development or being initialised now, so time is already short for those of us involved in the technical parts of the exercise. The publishing process is slow, but this is also why preprints are so valuable. This paper in its submitted form has been up for months, it’s only now the final version is ready, but it hasn’t changed much. While it feels hard enough keeping up with published papers that preprints feel like a distraction, science is moving so fast, it’s probably essential. Maybe I’ll write more about that later. Of course preprints (and indeed published papers) can lead you astray, especially in fields you don’t know much about (as COVID was a helpful reminder), so perhaps sensibly the IPCC insists on acceptance of manuscripts before including them in their reports. Nonetheless, keeping up with preprints is now probably almost as important for scientists as keeping up with the published literature.
On the subject of the IPCC, I was reminded this weekend that it’s now less than 500 days until the submission deadline for the working group 1 part of the next IPCC report (AR7), so it’s time to start thinking about what are the priorities to get into the scientific literature to inform this effort. IPCC can only report published work, and doesn’t do its own, so now is the moment to pull out that unfinished but crucial piece of evidence of something or other relevant and get it submitted.
Not coincidentally, it’s time to talk about Academic Writing Month (AcWriMo). I actually try to write all through the year but November is time for a final push to try and meet my (usually far too ambitious) annual goals.
I had intended to start AcWriMo again this year, I’ve a huge backlog of papers to get done and it seemed a good way to start. However, a big proposal writing effort (more on here if the funding comes through) and a Hackathon (of which more also anon), both extremely rewarding and in fact also involving a lot of writing, somewhat derailed the first 10 days of my effort…
Now however it is time to focus on the remaining almost 3 weeks of November. The plan is one hour per day, except weekends, just focused on papers. I’ve put it in my calendar already. Let’s see if I can stretch more than that. Also non- negotiable is daily exercise. The fresh air and time away from the computer is almost as important as sitting down to do the work.
I’ve got an almost done experimental protocol to write for the PolarRES project (which finishes his month, so there’d be a nice symmetry to getting that done). And then there’s the much delayed reply to reviewers on our ice mélange study in NW Greenland as my main foci, but I also want to help my Hackathon group get their project knocked into shape, so some time will be spent there.
I’ve also got various diverse co-authored papers I need to contribute to, read,edit and give my options on. I hate to become a roadblock for colleagues so that also needs some attention but I’m for sure already out of time.
So if you want to see all stages of the sausage being made, follow along with the hashtag (#AcWriMo25) on socials, but hopefully you won’t see me there much because I #amwriting.
LISA: the Lightweight In Situ Analysis box is one of a kind; built by our friends at PICE in the Niels Bohr Institute. Later this year we’re taking LISA to Antarctica for the first time ever, to analyse shallow snow and firn cores directly in the field.
This is part of our contribution to the EPIC iQ2300 – a project led by Prof. Arjen Stroeven in Stockholm and organised by the Swedish Polar Research Secretariat.
iQ2300 is a huge project, and we are just a small part of it: the aim is to understand Dronning Maud Land’s evolution from the Holocene and out to 2300. Expect to hear a lot more about this effort in coming months…
Map of Antarctica, I lifted from polar.se : LISA will be visiting the Swedish Wasa station in DML – the top bit on this map – with us
Now back to our humble friend.
We hope LISA will help us understand how much snow falls in Dronning Maud Land, how much it varies from year to year and what is the influence of sea ice and far field atmospheric processes on the rate of snowfall. Snowfall is exceptionally difficult to measure and one of our biggest uncertainties in working out Antarctic mass budget and the response of Antarctica to a changing climate (spoiler alert: we might have a paper coming out about this shortly)…
Meet LISA: a view inside the Magic Box..
Although LISA has been used in Greenland before, this is quite an experimental deployment, which means potentially really a lot of valuable scientific results. We would ultimately liek to build an Antarctic specific box, but that will have to wait to see if the results of this deployment are as good as we hope. (And some funding – if you are a billionaire with a spare couple of hundred thousand Euros, we’re always interested in talking).
The box itself is conceptually simple but in practice a little complex with a multiplicity of tubes, connectors and spare parts. This means it’s easy to fix if it breaks down, but also we need to understand how it works first.
There’s a lot to remember and a lot to check but we’re reasonably hopeful we’ll get good results. The aim is to understand both the interannual variability on decadal timescales and the spatial gradients in snowfall accumulation. It’s a huge task, so it’s probably fortunate that we have 6 weeks or so (depending on the weather always!) to try and get it deployed at anumber of different sites which will hopefully allow us to do this.
It’s a big change to my normal fieldwork activities, but also a logical extension of them. And highly complementary to the climate and SMB modelling we are developing.
Nonetheless, ithere’s a lot of new stuff and I have in the past weeks learnt a great deal about transporting very small amounts of mildly hazardous chemicals on airlines, how to deal with customs and pack fragile instruments in large boxes.
Much more to come on this project, so stay tuned…
Clement getting stuck into using the software that measures different properties in the cores.
Most people outside of Denmark know about hygge these days, but the term janteloven is less familiar. For British readers the most appropriate translation would be tall poppy syndrome.
Anyway, I’ve hesitated a bit to write this post a bit, but at the same time I am delighted and proud and actually a bit surprised to have been awarded an honorary Professorship at Aarhus University.
My very kind and extremely smart former boss at DMI, Professor Peter Langen, now leads the Environmental Science Department at Aarhus University (actually based at Risø near Roskilde and not in Aarhus). He put me and my amazing and very talented colleague Shuting Yang forward to the University for this honour earlier this year and we heard just before the summer break it had been accepted.
It’s a purely honorary position, so I don’t get paid by the University, on the other hand it doesn’t come with any obligations either and it lasts for 5 years. I’m hopeful though that it will lead to new and exciting collaborations and maybe even new studentships and other programmes. I’ve always enjoyed working with students, so if you’re at Aarhus University and looking for a thesis supervisor working on polar climaet and ice sheets, give me a shout.
I already co-supervise one PhD with the Environmental Science department and I’m extremely impressed with the calibre of research there. The universe moving, as it does, in mysterious ways, a few days ago we also got good news about Horizon Europe funding that will also facilitate closer working with AU so watch this space for more on that front.
Now I guess it’s time to start thinking about an inaugural lecture or something and I’m looking forward to exploring the rather beautiful fjordside campus of Risø when I get chance.
I very rarely have time to write a proper field diary, our time in the field is usually extremely hectic and filled with 12-18 hour working days that blend seamlessly together. I suspect this week is also going to be busy, but Nature has offered an olive branch in the shape of an early break-up of the sea ice, so I’m taking a moment to write a few things down. Updates will be posted at the top so scroll down to read the first day.
And finally…
I’m writing this on the metro home, I’ll spare you the flight delays, the packing up dramas, the last minute, “just one more snow pit”…
Melville Bugt from the air
It was a good tour. Enormous amount of work done, perhaps more importantly, it has also been foundational work, on both data and field site management, it will be much easier for colleagues to help us maintain this and to build up a long term data set of all the observations (and more that I haven’t written about here) in future. That should reduce costs and field time in the future but also give others the opportunity to visit and do their own research up here.
The traditional hunters gloves turn out to be by far the best thing to work in when programming outside. You can put your hands in and out very fast and they are super warm.
I think streamlining the storage of data is extremely important. There is far too much data in the world on hard drives and in field notebooks, doing no good to anyone. This system will be much easier for other colleagues to use what we have collected and we will be able to publish them outside of DMI soon too. I remain committed to FAIR publishing, but I often feel the barriers are practical rather than psychological.
I’ve also introduced my new(ish) colleague Abraham to the Arctic. Given he grew up in a place without snow it has been a delight to watch him discover the processes and problems that I’ve been working on the last 20 years and that we’ve been discussing together the last 18 months. I believe it’s extremely important for climate modellers to understand and see the system they’re trying to model. This trip has definitely confirmed me in that. This was not just a field campaign but also a pedagogical field trip in some ways too. We have also had the opportunity to brainstorm a lot of new research ideas along the way, there is rarely such time in the office, so plenty more to work on in coming years..
The DMI geophysical facility, newly painted!
As ever massive thanks to many colleagues, especially Aksel our DMI station manager without whom this work would be close to impossible given he is both interpreter and collaborator on the practical observations; Qillaq Danielsen for taking us out on to the sea ice with his sled. Steffen for running an extremely valuable long-term programme, Andrea for helpful and practical discussions and of course Abraham for making it a very good week. Glad we got to do this.
I should also say a large thankyou to my husband for keeping the home front running smoothly along whilst I am travelling. None of this would work otherwise.
Tak for denne gang Qaanaaq!
Day 6: Last day
It’s amazing how fast the tine goes, our last full day in the field (we’d originally planned for 9 days, but that was partly because last year we planned a week and it got cut to 3 days due to flight weather problems, I learned and left a safety margin this year). Nonetheless, a busy day. As we’re really interested in lots of different processes that combine in what we call the Arctic Earth System our focus for today was twofold, looking at the atmosphere and the subsurface, both of which are partly other scientists projects, but giving data we really want to use with our climate model, both for evaluation and development.
Aksel and Abraham giving the site a few last tweaks
The main aim was to finalise the snow site ready for observations over the next year. We finally reinstalled the remaining FC4 and new logger, this has been ticking over and being tested in our station kitchen for the last couple of days. I’m rather pleased with myself in managing to get these 2 talking to each other, I was envisaging a bigger struggle, but the Campbell Scientific software is very easy to use with good user guides.
The installation was the last element for the snow site and after Aksel and Abraham’s sterling work in building our new logger station, it was trivially easy.
Et voilá! We have a fully functional snow site…
The experience with the new Campbell system proved invaluable in the next task, downloading a whole bunch of data from colleagues’ weather stations for shipping back to Denmark. Normally, we would have been a bigger crew to handle work on the sea ice as well as at the station, but as the sea ice broke up so early (see Day 1), our local hunter friends had taken them down and brought them in to Qaanaaq for us. They needed a bit of repacking, data downloads and checks and we set up a skin temperature calibration station for the satellite group, which I think will also be quite interesting for us in polar regional climate modelling to use. This we left overnight for longest possible calibration.
As we have many collaborations we also spent an hour trying to collect some data from the subsurface permafrost sensors installed by our colleagues at the University of Copenhagen. Unfortunately, it appears they need rather more maintenance than we can provide, so that will need a full team. I am extremely keen to see the data though, ten years + of permafrost and temperature measurements is a seldom dataset and will be super interesting to use in the further development of our surface scheme. Qaanaaq is somewhat vulnerable to permafrost disturbance as it is built on sediments, so monitoring this in a warming climate is pretty important.
A long day, but made even longer by the excitement of narwhals in the bay! We headed out to the ice edge at 11pm, (the polar day plays havoc with your body clock), where quite a few hunters had gathered and were busy slicing up a freshly caught narwhal, eagerly filmed by at least one of the several film crews and photographers there appear to be in the town right now. We have noticed increasing numbers of film crews visiting this part of the world. It can be surprisingly busy.
Greenland does have a strictly regulated quota on narwhals, it’s an important part of the culture, but it is a bit brutal to watch if you’re not used to seeing animals sliced up. Personally, I think everyone should see where the meat they eat comes from. It would make us all more honest about agriculture. But I digress, I was actually more excited to see live ones out in the bay. We’re immensely fortunate to see them, this is only the 2nd time in 5 years I have seen live narwhal here, and it’s only really because the ice has shrunk so early allowing them in. I have immense respect for the hunters who go out in flimsy lightweight kayaks to harpoon them. That must take some courage.
It’s such a peaceful scene, hard to imagine the life and death struggle implied here.
UPDATE: And as an aside, our ace colleagues and collaborators at the Greenland Institute of Natural Resources have a wonderful series of videos exploring all kinds of research in Greenland, including this brilliant one featuring Malene Simon Hegelund and my DMI colleague Steffen Olsen, together with Qillaq Danielsen who we were also out with this year, which really gives a flavour of fieldwork in Qaanaaq and just how important our collaborations with the local community and Greenlandic scientists are.
Day 5: Glacier Day!
As an unrepentant glaciologist, I always look forward to glacier day, when we get up onto the land ice. In this case it’s only a tiny outlet glacier from a rather small local ice cap (well I say small, in the Alps it’d be considered quite large, but by Greenland standards it’s small but well studied). It’s easily accessible and the point about today was to take surface snow measurements and density profiles, so accessible is good.
The deep soft snow that has been a bit of a bane everywhere this year was also a problem. It was very heavy going, there isn’t really a path, just very loose rocks in a (at this time of year dry) riverbed, which is bad enough in summer but when covered in 30cm of snow was quite heavy going. Nonetheless we made a decent pace and got quite high up. By the time we came down again, the outwash river was starting to show signs of life again. It was a cold day, between -3 and -5C but the blazing sunshine alone is enough to start to generate melt and we saw plenty of signs of radiation driven melt going on under the surface snow crust, especially where there were dust layers to accelerate the process.
The snow pits proved indeed how cold the snow has been, typically around -10C at the bottom of the pits, but in one we also found signs of refrozen melt water, perhaps from the brief March warm period?
Ice layers in the snow, surprisingly difficult to photograph, you’re going to have to trust us on this one!
We did a transect down with our borrowed infrasnow, made several density profiles and had quite an efficient time. The idea is to repeat this transect at different times of the year so we can see how the snow properties change. In particular, I’m interested in surface albedo (how much incoming light is reflected by a surface). The reflectivity of the snow and ice surface is extremely important for the energy budget, which in turn controls how fast the snow (and ice) melt as well as being important for satellite data retrievals of surface temperature.
The Infrasnow is a very neat device that measures density and specific surface area. It’s not quite the same thing as albedo but it will help us to develop our albedo scheme in the model as it is based on grain size. Unfortunately it does not work on glacier ice, which is some places we also saw peeking out the top where wind has scoured the surface snow away. The movement of snow by wind is the subject of our final full day in the field.
We continued the observations off the glacier all the way to the road so we have a nice base transect that can be repeated to assess how conditions change through the year.
Although we only hiked 10km, it was quite tough, so next year we’ll bring snow shoes…
Tomorrow is our final full day. Lots more to do.
Day 4
Day 4 was pretty typical of the highs and lows of fieldwork. We finished (or I should say my colleagues finished) a new mounting for the snow site logger box so hopefully the icing problem will be reduced, we (re-)installed all the instruments except for the new loggers and generally tidied up. It’s looking pretty nice now. This was a high.
Part way through the reinstallation at the snow site
Then, I struggled and failed for about 4 hours to try and get the snow drift sensors to talk to the new logger. That was frustrating low. low. However, a walk around on the fast ice in the bay to try and take a new sea ice core was some valuable breathing space – a little bit of rewiring later and the first numbers started ticking in as planned…. Hurray! That was a high!
It’s immensely satisfying solving these kind of problems. And it was the first time I’ve programmed one of these loggers – new skills are also always rewarding to learn, even if the process is frustrating. I’ve learnt a lot about SDI-12 interfaces and how the instruments actually work too. I need to remember to give myself more deep work time back in the office too. It’s much more personally rewarding and advances the science much more than endless emails and meetings.
While the attempt to get an ice core was interesting, ultimately we failed due to very broken and uneven ice that made access to the part of the sea ice we wanted to get to with our kit too difficult – that was a low. I am simply counting the attempt as my evening walk, in which case maybe it counts as a high? I’ve often thought of Caspar David Friedrich’s famous Arctic painting The Sea of Ice in the coastal part of the fast ice. It’s spectacularly fractured and churned up, though FReidrich’s ice blocks are a little too angular – the real sea ice flakes are a bit more rounded.
Where the fast ice meets the land…
We also did lots of preparation for day 5’s trip to the local glacier, planned a final UAV structure-from-motion mapping campaign on land and got software working to download data on permafrost from sub-surface loggers for colleagues at the University of Copenhagen – that will all however have to wait until tomorrow, our last full day in the field. Today, we have a date with a tiny local glacier.
Day 3
I’d originally assigned only one day in the fieldwork plan for the snow site work, but given we missed our prep day to go directly into the field, we have missed a few crucial steps, so we have been busy today trying to catch up, but mostly in the workshop here at the DMI geophysical facility in Qaanaaq with a couple of visits out to the snow site.
I realised I haven’t introduced the snow site.
View over towards the south west from the old ionospheric research station on the edge of Qaanaaq. Our snow site in the foreground. It has a great view, if you ignore the town dump at the coast!
It is a small area on the edge of the village (unfortunately near the town dump, but otherwise perfect) where we are conducting a long-term (hopefully) series of observations – we’re currently only at the end of the first year so there are a few teething troubles to sort out. We’re installing a new logger for our snow drift sensors, adding a new snow cam and downloading data from the current one. We also have a standardised set of measurements of snow properties (density, temperature, reflectivity) that we carry out whenever time and opportunity permits, that we will hopefully use to better understand how the snowpack evolves through time. The land based side is a kind of complement to a longer set of observations I have from throughout the region – all point measurements made at rather random times and locations, so the constant monitoring site will hopefully help us to understand the wider context in space and time of those point data. In fact I have a student workign on digitising that data now, so I hope to soon make available the whoel dataset for research purposes.
Snow is incredibly important in the Arctic: it forms an insulating layer over sea ice that prevents futher formation in the winter, but also helps to stop or delay surface melt in the spring and summer. On land, the insulating properties of snow also help to preserve vegetation, insects and mammals through the winter, with specific vegetation assemblages being very much determined by the local snow patterns. And that’s without even discussing the importance of snow to glaciers and ice sheets.
Do you want to do a snow pit? (I asked) Yes! said my colleague. It’s always good to get the modellers to understand just how hard observations can be.
However, it turns out to be difficult to measure when it falls, difficult to work out how much blows around, challenging to model when it melts and when it refreezes and generally a larger than we’d hope uncertainty in weather and climate models. Much of the work developing parameterisations that describe snow properties has been done at lower latitudes too. High Arctic snow is certainly different in many respects to more southerly locations and that needs to be accounted for.
Hence the establishment of our snow programme. Which sounds rather big and impressive, but we’re hoping to set it up sufficiently smoothly this year that it will almost run itself with minimal input from us and assistance from colleagues. Let’s see, there are still some teething troubles to sort out.
The sea ice has now cleared out of a huge part of the bay in front of Qaanaaq and the hunters have been busy taking boats out from the edge of the ice so there are clearly narwhals expected soon. Although, we’ve spent most of the last two days indoors, I keep looking outside, hoping to see some of the marine mammals that visit here. There are already masses of sea birds arriving. Yesterday managed to spot a rather handsome snow goose couple on my evening walk at 11pm.
On my evening walk today I went to the very eastern edge of the town to get a look at the sea ice in the fjord – it’s quite clearly retreating rapidly now; much of the area we travelled over on Friday has gone.
View down Inglefield Fjord with the sea ice breaking up in the distance
Day 2
After Day 1’s rather hectic and busy time, Day 2 was assigned post-processing status. We had a slightly later than the 6am start yesterday, and put some serious effort into assessing our results from the previous day. That means downloading data, clearing up wet kit to dry it off properly, repacking stuff we don’t need further. Then there is the computer work, doing some initial processing, backing up files, writing field notes and doing some measurements (of salinity) on the sea ice cores we collected.
Conductivity/salinity measurements of a melted sea ice core in the workshop, fieldwork is very diverse. And fun.
We also made time to visit our snow site to download data from the instruments there. Unfortunately, it was clear that we need to somewhat reorganise the site, the logger box was completely snowed in, and I was a bit sceptical there would be any data at all. So we collected in some of the instruments for testing and further data downloads in the workshop instead of trying it out in the field. In fact, fieldwork means a lot of tidying up and computer work! I used the opportunity to reorganise and standardise the way we archive all our data, including the UAV images as well as the meteorology instruments, which will also hopefully mean we have an easier time to find and use it in the future.
It wasn’t all laptop work though, we did a few snow pits and some further testing of the Infrasnow system we have borrowed. I’m actually quite impressed with it – very straightforward to use and very consistent data produced.
It’s also always fun to check our snowcam – this takes a photo of a stake every 3 hours to monitor the depth of the snow pack, and quite often we get beautiful views and some cheeky ravens hopping past too – I live in hope for an Arctic fox, or even a bear.
Two ravens in the snow, exploring some leftovers apparently.
On the subject of bears, I had heard there were rumours of one near the snow site, but sure enough there were the footprints – rather small and filled in with snow but quite distinctive and heading up towards the ice cap. We shall be extra careful when we go up on to the glacier later this week.
Day 1
We had originally planned terrestrial, glacier and sea ice work, primarily focused on snow processes. The sea ice part though was altered and expanded when the rapid break up in April and again this month was observed. Normally, we’d have a preparation day between arrival and going into the field, but the threat of winds and high temperatures meant we decided not to risk it and we went out straight away on the first full day. Our instincts to just go yesterday turned out to be correct, we had perfect weather and with the help of Qillaq, one of the local hunters we still made it out on to the sea ice. So all is not lost. I woke up this morning to see a wide blue sea just off the last pieces of fast ice on Qaanaaq, so I’m very happy with that decision. Sentinel-2 captured this yesterday while we were out in fact.
It probably looks more dangerous than it is. We were working on the stable fast ice to the east of the big flake, that stretches right into the fjord. The local topography make it very stable and our measurements yesterday confirmed it’s pretty typical for the time of year in thickness, though there was a surprising amount of snow on top, which can actually help to protect the ice from melt at this time of year.
Getting around the coast was surprisingly straightforward, the fast ice has a very stable platform, though some large churned up part of the ice with cracks made for some slightly bumpy manoeuvres to get on and off the stable parts.
Manoeuvring the sled through the coastal zone
The dogs were I think happy when it was over. But in fact it was much more straightforward than I’d feared. The large crack we noticed earlier in the week that opened into a wide lead further extended while we were out, see below, and I woke up this morning to a wide open lagoon. It’s an extraordinarily beautiful place to work and I feel so privileged, especially on days like today when the weather is also being extra nice.
Happy dogs on the way home. Note the large area of open water behind that opened up while we were out.
Work wise it was a successful day, we managed 2 stations, where we did very extensive work. I’d have liked a third but the deep snow made it very heavy and slow going to travel on and in spite of the early start we basically ran out of time and had to return home.
Qillaq and Abraham taking a manual measurement of snow depth and ice thickness next to target for the UAV calibration flights.
We flew the UAV for surface properties, did a lot of snow pits and snow surface properties work, drilled some ice cores (which I will be working on this morning) and even got our loaned EM31 working to do automated ice thickness mapping. We will hopefully start to look at the data later on today to make sure it makes sense before we leave on Thursday.
Our first sea ice core of the season
The reduction in ice means we can actually concentrate on the terrestrial part of the work plan for the rest of the week. And there’s a lot to do!
Last year I set up a semi-permanent snow site to monitor conditions on land through the year. It is going to get a bit of an upgrade this week with some new instruments and of course we need to get the rest of the data downloaded and processed from here too.
Over on Blue sky I found a link to this piece by Daniel Nettle – a reflection on life as a researcher, the race for the glittering prizes of high profile publications and how to “succeed” in academia, where succeed has the simple metric of ‘in ten years.. to have remained alive, and ideally continued doing some research.’
Ten years ago in Greenland, I did not imagine I’d still be doing this job-
I found myself very much nodding along with the sentiments of the piece, the conceit that
“Our seduction was by the primary research process: the idea that you could find a question; hit on your own approach; perform and manufacture the work; and finally, see it there in print, with your name attached, a thread woven in to the tapestry of human knowledge. A thread of memory.”
that also motivates me and apparently others in the research world. I still think that idea of building something bigger, no matter how tiny the contribution, the sum total of knowledge is a motivating factor. As Daniel writes, it’s a seduction, but it is also one that resonates and lasts, even through those years when the grind gets you down…
This part also made me laugh in recognition about what makes people persevere in research:
“If she [a student interviewing professors about success in academia] knew how narrowly I have hung on, I thought, she might have chosen someone else for her assignment.”
It’s not always easy keeping going, much of our work requires intrinsic motivation and it too often dissolves into something self-destructive. Famously, science and research in general is prone to mental health problems and I rather liked the characterisation here:
“Periodic demoralization and depression are not rare amongst researchers. It’s not not caring any more, or not being able to be bothered, as depression is often and erroneously characterized. It is caring so much, being so bothered, that one cannot advance on any front. One drowns in one’s own disorganized and gradually souring passion. This feeling is probably near-ubiquitous too.”
But persevere we do and persevere we must and where I thought this piece gets really interesting is where he points to the techniques and lessons that lead us to surviving the academic environment. As the essay is rather long, and a pdf, I thought I would summarise his main lessons here. The first one is I think the most important and while he calls it every day has to count for something (where every day means every *working* day, time off is still essential). I prefer to summarise it as just one thing.
Lesson 1. Every day has to count for something
“I try to start each working day with a period of uninterrupted work. Work, for me, is: collecting data, analysing data, writing code, drafting a paper, writing ideas in a notebook, or just thinking. Things that do not qualify as work are: background reading, literature searches, answering correspondence, marking students’ assignments, peer-reviewing a paper, sorting out my website, correcting proofs, filling in forms, tidying datasheets, having meetings, and so on.”
This goes back to paying yourself first. I’m not always very good at doing it, but I also try to do something meaningful and deep work like each day. Part of the reason I have found the last few months quite hard at work is a surfeit of meetings, workshops and travels, which have been in general quite destructive and distracting from the main work of the day, which could probably be summed up as, learn how the icy bits of the world work. My #AcWriMo efforts as well as #30dayMapChallenge in November were in effect just the kick start I needed to get back into the real scientific work of research, because as Daniel Nettle so eloquently put it:
Daily deep work keeps the black dog away, for there is nothing worse for mood than the sense that one is not progressing. And it can spiral in a bad way: the more you feel you are not progressing, the worse you feel; the worse you feel the more your hours become non-deep junk; and the more exhausted you are by non-deep junk hours, the less you progress.
Not all black dogs are bad.
Lesson 2. Cultivate modest expectations
This was a curiously freeing part to read and I absolutely agree with it. Too often what John Kennedy calls Natureorscience papers are seen as the gold standard. And yet as Daniel Nettle eloquently points out:
the glittering prizes we academics strive for are positional goods kept deliberately scarce by bureaucratic or commercial interests, and allocated in ways whose relationship to long-term value is probably quite weak. For example, Nature is a for-profit enterprise that rejects nearly everything in order to defend its exclusive market position. If we all send everything there, the rejection rate goes up. If we all increase the quality of our science, it still nearly all gets rejected, by the very design of the institution. The idea that all good papers can be in Nature or Science is as ludicrous as the idea that all Olympic athletes can get gold medals, but without the strong link between actual ability and finishing position that obtains in the Olympics.
It’s absolutely true that a natureorscience paper on the CV is seen as a big thing, the ultimate to strive far. And it is. Getting through the review process is in itself an achievement. But it’s also worth bearing in mind that many natureorscience landmark studies don’t stand the test of time. They rarely shift paradigms, though they can focus attention on new subjects, and sometimes that’s a new and important field. And sometimes it’s a distraction. I can think of several notable examples published since I started working in glaciology (but no, I’m not going to call them out here). The text in these journals is often far too compressed to get important details in, I recall an old mentor suggesting that the natureorscience paper is the advert, the starter that reels you in. The good stuff, the actual filler that makes you look at the world anew with its insights, new methodologies and the rest, is very often in a very different journal. So go for natureorscience if you get the opportunity, and if you have the results, but aiming for there from the start is not necessarily the right way to position your research career. Though as this post is now veering dangerously towards giving advice rather than simply expressing my usual slightly scrambled thoughts, take this one with a dollop of Atlantic brine..
For what it’s worth though, I do believe this:
Great art often begins on the fringe. Similarly, valuable future paradigms and innovative ideas start life in obscure places. Journal editors cannot yet see their potential, and the authors themselves are tentatively feeling their way into something new. So by focussing on capturing the established indicators of prestige, you distort the process away from answering the question that interests you in an authentic way, and into a kind of grubby strategizing. Or so I tell myself, admittedly through clenched teeth at times.
Lesson 3. Publish steadily
Is back to just one thing in a way.
the mistake a lot of people make is focussing too much on getting the big shot, the single career-establishing paper in a top journal, and therefore not quietly building up a solid, progressive portfolio of sound work.
Doing the work is the best advice I can give and the advice I would give myself back in the early days of what has become (almost by accident) a research career. Now, I would hesitate to say publish something every year. I know scientists who insist on one first author paper a year, and some who strive for 3. Both seem arbitrary and potentially dangerous in terms of motivation, particularly for a young ECR just making their first steps and unsure of how to do it. Nevertheless it’s certainly true that, regardless of publish or perish, just the feeling of making forward progress, however incremental, is so important. Keep the momentum going. It’s part of what makes the traditional british PhD ending with a big book so hard, there’s no feedback on the way. Just an hour a day (or even an hour a week in busy times) is enough to keep me moving forward, and it’s often enough to produce a decent paper, eventually. And don’t worry, science is highly collaborative, I wouldn’t be able to do it without all my colleagues to remind me on, nudge me to get on with something and keep the wheels turning. I love you all for it too…
So if you are worrying about staying the game, rather than planning your next Science publication, I would ask yourself where your 1-2 solid papers each year are going to come from. Just as you should not go a single day without proper work, you should not go a single year without publishing anything, as one year rapidly becomes three.
Lesson 4: Get your hands dirty
This is why I do field work. But it’s also why I’ve embraced the opportunity to learn more about deep learning and AI/ML methods. Learning new stuff is exciting, it keeps you fresh and helps make new connections. It’s when disciplines cross-connect that the exciting stuff happens and the sparks fly in the brain.
“Keeping your hands dirty also means learning how to do new things. And this is a good thing: the skills I picked up in graduate school could not possibly have sustained me this long. Learning new skills has always paid dividends of one kind or another; and stepping back from doing primary research myself has always been the point at which things have started to go less well.”
I have written one too many white paper style articles recently, it’s time to go back to the field, and back to the code to see if we can make things better by integrating the data and the models.
Learning to fly a drone and to process the data is something I’ve been working on the last few years. I have a really exciting dataset now but little time to work on it. Ifyou’re looking for an interesting MSC thesis project get in touch!
A note of caution though, it’s always easier to start something new than finish an old project. The best colleagues will help you stay on track and make sure you finish what you started!
I’m going to add one more point, which isn’t expressly mentioned in the original piece that started this ramble:
Lesson 5: Cultivate outside interests.
Far too many of us put families, friends, sports, hobbies and anything else that doesn’t taste of work to one side, in pursuit of the all-consuming. It’s not only not healthy, it’s also limiting. The brain needs time off to churn away by itself. You can’t force that unconscious process. Better to take a long walk to admire the flowers than try to twist your brain in knots when you hit a wall. A good night’s sleep is an amazingly effective part of the research process too.
So there we have it, some thoughts on being a (mid-career) scientist and how I have managed to stay in the game. YMMV as the Americans say.
Finally, all that I have said relies on having a supportive employer and good colleagues. The sometimes horrifying stories (take for example this one) of people being pushed out by bullying colleagues, or structural discrimination is a whole other story. And not one I’m going to take on here, but I would point out that without organisation, labour inevitably gets crushed by capital, so organise, join a union, find out what your rights are and make sure that you have a supportive hinterland to help you get through the bad times.
And everyday, do just one thing to help you advance.
This is the first in a two-parter. At this time of year, posts making bold statements about what happened last year and what we plan to do this year start to become prominent. The last few years I have spent a few hours in the first week of January reviewing what worked, what was fun and what was cool, what was awful and what definitely was a waste of time. I’m not honestly sure that any of this is of interest to anyone except me, so read on, but you have been warned..
2024: Themes of this year: Greenland, Machine Learning, people, and big data…
Working with scientists from the Greenland natural resources institute and local hunters on the sea ice.
The final trip was in October for a workshop with scientists in Greenland about climate change impacts in Greenland, the subpolar gyre and AMOC for the UN Ocean decade. It was a memorable meeting for the sheer range and quality of science presented as well as for being stranded in Nuuk by a broken aeroplane in quite ridiculously beautiful weather (I mostly stayed in my hotel room to write the aforementioned paper, sadly. In 2025 I will work on my priorities) .
Apart from fieldwork I have really tried hard on publications this year. I have (like many scientists I suspect), far more data sitting around on hard drives than I have published. It’s a waste and it’s also fun to work on actual data instead of endless emails. This is something I intend to continue focusing on the next few years as well. There is gold in them thar computers…
We had a couple of writing retreats were very successful. These I plan to continue also and the PRECISE project grant is happily flexible enough to do this. I probably achieve as much in terms of data processing and paper writing in 3 focused days as I would in 3 months in the office. It paid off too. I managed to co-author 8 papers published this year (including my first 1st-author paper in ages – a workshop report, but nevertheless it counts.). Some of these are still preprints, so will change, and there are a couple more that have been submitted but are not yet available as preprints. I will submit two more papers in the next 3 weeks as well (1 first author), so January 2025 is going to be the 13th month of 2024 in my mind.
Bootcamps have been a theme the last 3 years, I organised the first in 2022 and so far there have been 4 publications from that first effort. There was another this year in June, ( I have attended them in 2023 and 2024 but was not organising) where we really got going on a project for ESA that I have had my eye on for a while – I hope the publication from that will be ready in the Spring this coming year.
Machine Learning: This was the year I really got machine learning. I’ve been following a graduate course online, and learning from my colleagues and students about implementations. I understand a lot more about the architecture and how to in practice apply neural networks and other techniques like random forests now. This is not before time, as we intend to implement these to contribute to CMIP7 and the next IPCC report. We still have a lot of work to do, but the foundation is laid. And it’s been fun to learn something that, if not exactly new, is a new application of something. In fact the biggest barrier has really been learning new terminology. We have also been fortunate that Eumetsat and the ECMWF have been very helpful in providing us with ML-optimised computer resources to test much of these new models out on. We’re actually running out of resources a bit though, so it’s time to start investigating Lumi, Leonardo and the new Danish centre Gefion to see what we can get out of these.
People: This year our research group has grown with another 2 PhD students, and at the end of the year we also employed a new post-doc. I think it’s large enough now. I’m very aware that if I don’t do my job properly, then not only the research but the people will suffer, so developing people management skills is really important. In any case it’s extremely stimulating to work with such talented young people and I’m really excited to see where the science will take us, given the skills in the team. I hope I have been good enough at managing such a large and young team, but I have my doubts. A focus for 2025 for sure.
Data: This has been the year of big data, not necessarily just for ML purposes but also in the PolarRES project the production and management of an enormous set of future climate projections at very high resolution. More on this anon. Suffice to say, it has taken a lot of my time and mental energy and it’s probably not the most exciting thing to talk about, but we now have 800 Tb of climate simulation data to dig into. I suspect that rewards of this will be coming for years. There has also been a lot of digging into satellite datasets and the bringing together of the two has been very rewarding already. It’s a rich seam, to continue the metaphor, that will be producing scientific gold for many years.
Projects: we have gone in the final year of two projects, PROTECT and PolarRES, both of which will finally end in 2025. We also arrived at the half way point of OCEAN:ICE. So rather than being a year of starts, it has been a year where we have started to prepare for endings – actually this is a fun part of many projects where a lot of the grunt work is out the way and we can start to see what we have actually found out. It can also be a slog of confusing data, writing and editing papers and dealing with h co-author comments. I’ve definitely been in that process this year, hopefully with some of the outputs to come next year…
Proposals: I started 2024 writing a proposal. Colleagues were in 3 different consortia for the same call, alas ours didn’t get funded, but 2 of the others did and will start this year. That is a good result for DMI and our group. I wrote another proposal in the Autumn and contributed to a 4th and finally at the end of the year I heard that both will *likely* be funded (but are currently embargoed and in negotiation, so no more will be said now). It sometimes feels that spending so much time and energy on proposal writing is putting the cart before the horse, but in fact I find proposal writing something akin to brainstorming. It’s essential of course to ensure we can continue to do the science we want, but it can also help us to clarify our ideas and make sure we’re not on the wrong track. It’s also a good way to keep track of what the funders are actually wanting to know and to help us focus on policy relevance.
There was also an incredible number of meetings, reports, milestones and deliverables, but you probably don’t want to hear about that…
Also missing from this summary is personal life, and, well that is not for sharing publically, but suffice to say, I learnt about raising teenagers, I also had some very good times with friends and family, to all of whom I immensely grateful for being a part of my voyages around the sun.
Anyway, reading all that back, I’m not surprised I ended the year exhausted! I am not planning on quite such a slog in future. I should probably pace myself a bit more this year, the plans for which will be the subject of next week’s post.
This post is in response to a thread posted on blue sky* by Jeremy Bassis and a discussion between Felicity mcCormack and Gavin Schmidt. All these people are well-respected climate scientists and the original thread was posted as a result of a Nature piece about operationalising climate models (and sea level rise), like we forecast the weather. This is something I’ve been thinking about for a while too, as sea level rise is an undeniable existential threat to my home country…
Anyway, I replied with a link to the Danish Climate Atlas – which to my mind is very much a model for how climate information should be done. I can’t give a full overview of the Climate Atlas, largely because it’s not my story to tell, but as Jeremy asked me to talk more in depth about it, and given the 300 character limit, I thought I’d formulate a few thoughts here first before sharing…
The climate atlas is not a book but a web frontpage that allows anyone with an internet connection to get high quality climate information at a local scale in Denmark. The map interface makes it easy and intuitive to use, and for detail a whole bunch of reports and datasets in different formats can be downloaded (everything from ASCII to GIS to netcdf). You can explore it here. All the data is given on a kommune (local authority) level except for sea level rise data which is divided up by coastal stretches.
Example of a Climate atlas figure – this is the overview figure, each local authority area is clickable for local information
For audiences that just want a quick message there are these easy to interpret icons with a key message below, like this one about higher water levels.
I was involved in the early stages and to my mind there are 4 crucial elements that have made it very successful:
Legal Requirement: Every local authority (a kommune, don’t think hippies, think regional councils) in Denmark has a legal obligation to make climate adaptation plans and to keep them updated. This element is important as it created awareness of the problem and effects of climate change and the necessity of investigating adaptation options. The initial plans were rather patchy and not very consistent with each other. Many regions had employed a consultant who was also maybe not an expert. Several kommune ended up with data based on CMIP resolution data! Hardly appropriate for a small local region in Denmark (which is barely resolved in most global climate models).
Data Foundation: At the same time we have been dynamically downscaling these simulations for decades, to provide really high quality locally bias corrected data (using also DMI’s long climatological time series to understand if and where biases exist). Colleagues at DMI identified a need to provide this in an easy to use format to everyone in the country. We had long ago discovered that working with motivated kommune employees led to a really good outcome: readable climate variables that are meaningful to an individual city, data formats that can be used by non-scienists (who definitely can’t deal with netCDFs).
Funding: Doing a data project properly requires money. The Climate Atlas is, compared to the cost of not doing anything, extremely cheap, nonetheless, it still costs something. Ear marked funding from the danish state to build up the Climate Atlas from the ground, to develop it as new needs are identified and to improve both communication and presentation has been crucial. Along the way several different needs have arisen (droughts, deep uncertainty in sea level rise), a new version will hopefully be coming soon.
Intense engagement: Probably the most crucial aspect to getting the climate atlas off the ground and into use has been communication over and over and over again. Not just initially with kommune to find out what they need (building on many years of background experience first), but also reaching out to special interest groups raning from local farmers in mid-west Jylland to sewage engineers, high school teachers and property developers. This continues, but has undeniably been helped by Denmark’s open trusting society and generous tradition of cultural meetings, continuing education and festivals.
The climate atlas in Denmark is the example I know best, we should be rightly proud of the team that constructed, maintain and continue to develop it. Other countries certainly have similar products in the Nordic and Blatic countries, and likely elsewhere, a network meets annually within the region to discuss developments etc. After a coincidental meeting, DMI was also invited to help develop one for Ghana, which is ongoing, and of course, will have completely different needs and requirements, However, the decision early one to base the back end of the Climate Atlas on open tools: python, cdo, github and CORDEX simulations, makes a lot of the learnings transferable.
If you want to know more, contact my colleagues at the Klima Atlas! I’m happy to put you in touch..
*As an aside, it’s interesting how many of the climate science and policy community have moved over to Blue Sky. It was rather quiet for a while but activity seems to have picked up. I’m not abandoning mastodon, which I actually prefer, but I’m happy to see an alternative to what has become known as Birdchan. I’d urge you to try it if you’re interested in a social media presence in a slightly more appealing environment. There are a number of handy tools, including fedica, that allow you to crosspost to multiple channels at the same time (including X, mastodon, bsky, TikTok and threads) and I’m also using the OpenVibe app, which has a common timeline from multiple platforms.
Way back in the mists of time, that is, early April, I and colleagues deployed some instruments on the sea ice in front of a number of glaciers in Northern Greenland, which I wrote a little bit about here.
Trusted global GPS tracker buoy
Open met buoy
Since then I’ve mostly been letting them get on with reporting their data back and occasionally checking on the satellite imagery to see how it’s looking in their surroundings.
It was about -30C and very cold when I left them out, so it’s sometimes quite hard to visualise just how much things will change over only a few months and to remember that at some point, they’ll need collecting
After a fairly melty start (yes, that is actually a technical term) to July, particularly in the northern part of the ice sheet (which you can see on the polarportal, see also below right) it’s time to start anticipating their collection.
We have a lot of advantages when it comes to coordinating this kind of project now, compared to the bad old days when imagery and communication were both scarce and expensive
For starters, there is Sentinel Hub’s EO browser, a course in which should be a requirement for every earth science adjacent subject in my opinion. EO Browser produces superb pre-processed imagery for free, such as this one, from the European Space Agency’s Sentinel-2 satellite yesterday
As you can see, the sea ice is still there but fracturing and patches of open water (in blue green) are now becoming visible.
Sentinel 2 satellite image processed on EO browser showing sea ice and ice bergs in front of Tracy and Farquhar glaciers.
If you’re out and about and only have your phone, there is also the excellent snapplanet.io app on your smartphone, with which you can create instagram ready snapshots of the planet or even animated gifs, with high resolution imagery a link away…
Now that’s what I call a fun social media* application…
Animated gif of satellite images showing the front of Heilprin glacier with icebergs and landfast sea ice.
Anyway, back to the break up. Every year, the sea ice forms in the fjord from October/November onwards, by December it’s often thick enough to travel on and then from April it starts to thin and melt and by late June large cracks are starting to form, allowing the surface meltwater to drain through. For a look at what happens if you get a large amount of melt from, say, a foehn wind, before the cracks start to open up, see this iconic photo taken by my colleague Steffen Olsen in 2019.
An extremely rare event, that nevertheless went viral
The other advantage we have working in this fjord is our collaboration with the local hunters and fishers. In winter they use dog sleds for hunting and accessing fishing sites, and to take us and our equipment out on to the ice. In summer, they are primarily using boats for fishing, hunting narwhal and, hopefully, collecting our equipment! Our brilliant DMI colleague Aksel who lives and works in the local settlement is also a huge help in assisting with communication and generally being able to get hold of things and people when asked.
Winter travel
We offer a reward for each buoy that is found and brought back to our base in Qaanaaq, so many of them in fact make their own way home. But we also work with our friends on a kind of remote treasure hunt, challenge Anneka style, with someone at home watching their positions come in via the satellite transmissions and sending updated information via sms to an iridium phone to the hunters on the boat…
I’m told it’s tremendous fun, with sharp eyes required, as even a bright orange plastic globe can be challenging to spot.
A floating trusted buoy in 2022.
I’ve never participated in this treasure hunt myself sadly, on land we generally see something like a spaghetti of arrows and spots via the Trusted global web api:
GPS positions from a trusted buoy.
We then have to try and superimpose these movements on the latest satellite images to work out if the buoy is floating or not, and then check to see if there is sufficient open water for a collection. Naturally working with local knowledge for this part is also absolutely vital.
One of our buoys is found…
The latest satellite images look like the ice has already broken up into large flakes close to Qaanaaq. I’ve annotated the Sentinel-1 image below as it is from a radar satellite that can see through clouds and the images can be a bit confusing if you’re not used to looking at them.
The scale of the massive melt on the ice sheet from the last few days is clearly visible in the dark grey rim on the glaciers. The open sea water is black and the sea ice shows up as geometric greys. This one is downloaded from the automatic archive my colleagues at DMI maintain around the whole coast of Greenland. It can be a handy quick check too.
Annotated satellite image of Kangerlussuaq/Inglefield Bredning (Gulf of Inglefield) fjord. The orange box shows where our study glaciers are located.
So, although the ice is starting to break up it’s at the tricky stage where it’s far from navigable by dog sled and certainly too difficult for boats, so it’s not quite the time to send out hunting parties for GNSS buoys.
It also means that when I go on holiday next week, I will not be quite leaving all this behind. I and my colleague in this project will be monitoring the movements of the buoys and the satellite pictures, as well as relying on our friends in the local community to let us know how the ice is looking and if they can get out to rescue our brave little sensors.
In the mean time I have plenty of data to start analysing and writing up. As ever massive thanks to the people of Qaanaaq and my cool colleagues for putting up with me and our GPS buoys. We hope to submit our first paper pretty soon..
Hopefully I’ll soon be able to look at a map like this one to see where they are (note that the precision on these buoy positions isn’t great, probabaly because they were thenbeing stored in a metal container).
*Yes, I’m probably a nerd. I’m a lot of fun** at parties too though.
I’m lifting my head from the semi-organised chaos that is my office, my home office, our family basement and the office workshop to write a quick post. This might be for reasons of despairing procrastination.
The reason for the chaos is that fieldwork season has come round again and on Friday I and my DMI colleague Steffen will be off to Northern Greenland once again. I’ll try to post a few photos to pixelfed (and perhaps even Instagram, though I swore off Meta products after the Brexit fiasco).
This year my focus is again on the melange zone and we’ll be placing our instruments out to record the break-up of the fast ice. I also hope to get time to establish a new snow measurement programme – which I partly piloted last year. However, we will only be 2 scientists instead of the team of 4 this year, so this may have to wait until the second fieldwork period we have planned in early June (when the sea ice starts to break up). We are fortunate indeed that the local hunters, who still live a semi-subsistence lifestyle, are both incredibly competent and helpful and willing and eager to help when we go out on fieldwork.
Last year was a test of concept, and noone was more astonished than I was that the final set up not only survived the ice break up and floated safely down the fjord, we also managed to retrieve them and I hope they are waiting patiently in Qaanaaq so I can reprogramme and redeploy this year.
I wrote this piece on our work last year, promising a whole load of posts I didn’t end up having time to write. Sadly even my lego scientists never got an update. So instead of promising a whole lot of new posts, let me know what you’d like to see and read about either in the comments here or on my mastodon feed, and I’ll try to make some time to answer one or two of them while we go.
The area we travel to is going through very rapid changes now – not just climatic and environmental, but, perhaps even higher impact, social and cultural. I am privileged to be abel to witness it and we try hard to leave as little impact as possible.
At this stage it’s hard to imagine I’ll ever be ready to leave, but the clock is ticking down..
Hands-up who is looking for a new and very cool job in ice sheet and climate modelling and developing new machine learning tools?
REMINDER: 4 days left to apply for this PhD position with me at DMI looking at Antarctic Ice Sheet mass budget processes and developing new Machine Learning models and processes.
UPDATE 2: The PhD position on Antarctica is now live here. Deadline for Applications 18th February!
UPDATE: It’s not technically a PRECISE job, but if you’re a student in Copenhagen and are looking for a part-time study job (Note that this is a specific limited hours job-type for students in higher education in Dnmark) , DMI have got 2 positions open right now, at least one of which will be dedicated to very related work – namely working out how well climate and ice sheet models work when compared with satellite data. It’s part of a European Space Agency funded project that I and my ace colleague Shuting Yang, PI on the new TipESM project, are running. Apply. Apply. Apply…
This is a quick post to announce that our recruitment drive is now open. We’re split across three institutes. We are two in Copenhagen, ourselves at DMI and the Niels Bohr Institute at the University of Copenhagen, and then the University of Northumbria in Newcastle, UK.
The PI at the Niels Bohr Institute is the supremely talented Professor Christine Hvidberg, aided by material scientist and head of the institute, Joachim Mathiesen. I am leading for DMI, and the Northumbria work is led by Professor Hilmar Gudmundsson. We are also very fortunate to have the talents of Aslak Grindsted, Helle Schmidt, Nicolas Rathmann and Nicolaj Hansen already on board.
The project is already very cohesive between institutes, we’ve been working together for some time already and know each other well.
We have a good budget for travel and exchanges between groups, workshops, symposia, summer schools and the like, but perhaps more importantly, all the positions are focused at the very cutting edge (apologies for the cliche) of climate and ice sheet modelling. We are developing not just existing models and new ways to parameterise physical processes, but we also want to focus on machine learning to incorporate new processes, speed-up the production of projections for sea level rise, not forgetting an active interface with the primary stakeholders who will need to use the outcomes of the project to prepare society for the coming changes.
There’s also a healthy fieldwork component (particularly in Greenland, I don’t rule out Antarctica either), and if you’re that way inclined, some ice core isotope work too. So, if you’re looking for a new direction, feel free to give me a shout. I’m happy to talk further.
Links to all the openings, will be updated as they come out, these are currently open and have deadlines at the end of January:
Sterna Paradisaea 