Looking Backwards and Forwards: The first year of my polar PhD

One year ago I received the green light to do my PhD at the UCL Centre for Polar Observation and Modelling. The quirky London system meant that I’d already received my funding, and had been working out how to use it over the previous three months. From that email I had three years and nine months left to choose some scientific questions and try to answer them.

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One year later, I want to reflect on what’s happened so far, why it happened and what I have to look forward to in 2020.

This Year’s highlights

This year I attended a fantastic series of meetings and workshops:

In December I also had my first peer-reviewed publication accepted, exploring some of the biases involved in estimating sea ice thickness from satellite radar altimeters.

My Current Research

Since getting back from the Arctic at the beginning of November I’ve focused on two research tasks:

Firstly, I’m analysing the impact of a new dataset for snow on sea ice on our estimates of sea ice thickness. Recent improvements in our ability to model and detect snowfall in the Arctic allow us to introduce inter-annual variability in snow depths on sea ice. This will hopefully improve our altimetry-derived estimates of year-to-year sea ice thickness and volume.

Secondly, I’m modelling the stratigraphy of snow on Arctic sea ice, and from that modelling the snow’s microwave emission characteristics. I’ve linked the snowpack evolution and microwave radiative transfer models, and am now working on scaling the code to a pan-Arctic level. Doing this will hopefully deliver insight on what satellite scatterometers and radiometers are actually measuring when we point them at the sea ice. Further down the line, this will also hopefully provide a means of estimating how far radar from satellite altimeters is penetrating into the Arctic Ocean snowpack.

If you’d like to talk to me about either of these research avenues please send me an email!

Who Helped Me Survive First Year

This year I’ve had a really productive relationship with my two supervisors, Julienne Stroeve and Michel Tsamados. They’ve given me some great advice about what to do and not do with my time and funding, and they supported me to write my first publication even though it was a bit of a diversion! The paper wouldn’t even have been started without the insights of coauthors Isobel Lawrence and Jack Landy.

As well as my supervisors, a small collection of early career researchers have shaped my outlook and strategy. I’m particularly grateful to (in order of appearance) Rachel Tilling, Linette Boisvert, Scott Williamson and Lettie Roach for their honest views on how science really works and what PhD success might look like.

I’ve also joined an amazing community of polar-science PhD students. Shoutouts go to those on the blowing-snow team at the ICESat-2 Hackweek, on the BAS trip to Svalbard and on the MOSAiC School aboard Akademik Fedorov. As well as research excellence, these students are often dedicated to improving science by improving the community’s treatment of women and ethnic minorities. I’ve been particularly inspired by Carrie Harris and Prem Gill, vice president of APECS for ED&I and founder of Minorities in Polar Research respectively.

What Now?

I’ve got a couple of things to look forward to in the first half of 2020. I’ll be helping to run experiments at the Sea-Ice Environmental Research Facility at the University of Manitoba in early February. There we’ll grow ‘artificial’ sea ice in tanks of salt-water and then examine the wicking of brine into the snowpack that forms on top. The extent of this brine wicking is key to interpreting remote sensing data for the Arctic Ocean.

At the end of February I’ll attend the 6th Annual Snow Science Winter School in the French Alps. I’m really excited to learn more about snow metamorphism, as it’s super-important to my work on radar penetration on Arctic sea ice.

Here’s to a productive 2020 in polar research!

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