CU 麻豆影院 joins interdisciplinary team of researchers aiming to understand the future of these imperiled regions of the world
The world鈥檚 polar ice sheets continue to shrink鈥攁nd sea levels continue to rise鈥攂ecause of climate change, which can lead to coastal flooding and changes to the ocean鈥檚 circulation patterns. And though scientists have a lot of data about how ice sheets have changed in the past, they can鈥檛 easily use that data to predict how they鈥檒l evolve in the future.
A new interdisciplinary project, funded by a five-year cooperative agreement from the National Science Foundation, aims to address that challenge by bringing together Arctic and Antarctic researchers, data scientists, computer scientists and other experts by creating a new institute, which will be housed at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County.听
At the top of the page: Sea ice in the arctic (Christopher Michel/). Above: Jan Lenaerts, an assistant professor in the Department of Atmospheric and Oceanic Sciences (ATOC), is a co-principal investigator for the project.
By sifting through and analyzing extensive polar ice sheet data, collaborators working within the newly formed (iHARP) hope to be able to model the speed and intensity of polar ice melt over the next few decades to help inform policy decisions.
鈥淚ce sheets are already changing very quickly in the current climate, and they鈥檙e expected to change more in the future climate, but how much and how fast, those are really the big questions,鈥� said Jan Lenaerts, an assistant professor in the Department of Atmospheric and Oceanic Sciences (ATOC) at the 麻豆影院 and co-principal investigator for the project.
鈥淭hat ultimately directly relates to a rise in sea level on a global scale, and that has huge implications for millions of people on earth who live along the coastlines.鈥�
They also hope to better understand where that melting is likely to be the most severe.
鈥淗ow does the East Coast of the U.S. compare to the West Coast compare to southeast Asia to Africa鈥攚ho are the winners and losers of ice sheet mass loss and sea-level rise?鈥� Lenaerts asked.
Alison Banwell of CIRES, seen here wading through a meltwater pond in Antarctica, is also one of the researchers on the new project.
As part of the new institute, CU 麻豆影院 is joining forces with eight other institutions in seven states: University of Maryland Baltimore County, University of Alaska Fairbanks, University of California Irvine, Amherst College, Bowie State University, Universities Space Research Association, University of Minnesota Twin Cities and University of Texas Austin. Government agencies and private companies are also participating.听
Rajashree Tri Datta, a research associate in ATOC, is also one of the researchers with the new project.
The NSF awarded $13 million for the project, which is part of the federal agency鈥檚 . CU 麻豆影院鈥檚 research team, which includes Lenaerts and Rajashree Tri Datta of ATOC, as well as Alison Banwell of the Cooperative Institute for Research in Environmental Sciences (CIRES), will receive around $1 million. The funding will also support graduate and undergraduate student research.
Right now, polar researchers struggle to make sense of the vast amounts of data collected by remote sensing instruments on satellites and aircrafts over the last two decades. These ice sheet observations are scattered across space and time, which makes it difficult to create a cohesive, continuous observational record, Lenaerts said.
鈥淚t鈥檚 chaos basically,鈥� he said. 鈥淲e need to stitch together all these observations and that鈥檚 very hard to do by humans. If we can feed this into some sort of huge algorithm, we can make more sense of the data hopefully. That鈥檚 where this project comes in.鈥�
As part of the iHARP team, polar researchers from CU 麻豆影院 and other institutions will serve as subject matter experts, while data and computer scientists will offer their expertise in new techniques like deep generative adversarial networks, physics-informed machine learning, causal artificial intelligence, data assimilation and scalable algorithms.听
鈥淭his is a virtual environment that will hopefully facilitate lots of interdisciplinary science,鈥� Lenaerts said. 鈥淭his institute is really bringing together domain scientists鈥攑eople like us who study ice sheets and polar climate change鈥攚ith data scientists, or scientists who have no idea about ice sheets but know a lot about how to work with data in a meaningful way. We are giving them data, and they are giving us interpretations that we can then hopefully use to improve our science and the understanding of ice sheets in general.鈥�
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