I am pleased to announce that the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering at Carnegie Mellon University is seeking applicants for two PhD students to start in Fall 2021 or potentially earlier. Both PhD positions will be fully funded for 4 years. The two projects will focus on the response of glaciers to climate change and will involve working on two NASA grants related to NASA's High Mountain Asia Team (HiMAT) and NASA's Sea Level Change Team (SLCT). More information on both projects are provided below.
If you are interested in joining my research group, please send me an email ([email protected]) along with your CV. The application deadline for consideration is December 15th. More details on the application process may be found here. Applicants from underrepresented groups are encouraged to apply. All applicants will receive full consideration irrespective of race, color, nationality, gender, religion, age, identity, or disability. Global glacier evolution modeling: impacts on sea level rise and water resources Understanding the magnitude and timing of sea level change is important for all coastal communities. Global glacier mass loss (excluding the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets) currently contribute ~30% of present-day sea level rise. These glaciers are also an important freshwater resource, especially in areas like High Mountain Asia. This project will seek to advance parameterizations of poorly accounted for processes (e.g., debris cover, frontal ablation, glacier dynamics) using remotely sensed observations to refine projections of glacier mass change from 1950-2100. These observations will also be used to advance our ability to calibrate and validate our model. The project will support the development of the Python Glacier Evolution Model (PyGEM) and the PhD student will be an integral member of the NASA HiMAT and SLCT teams. Experience (or willingness to learn) with numerical modeling, computer programming, and/or remote sensing is needed. I expect there will be potential opportunities for the student to support fieldwork (if desired) as well. Fieldwork on debris-covered glaciers in Alaska Many glaciers around the world have a layer of debris on the ice, which controls the glacier melt rate as a thin layer enhances melt, while a thick layer insulates the underlying ice and suppresses it. In Alaska, which is one of the largest contributors to sea level rise, ~50% of glaciers (by area) have considerable debris cover over the glacier's tongue (i.e., the lowermost part of the glacier), yet few in-situ measurements of debris cover in Alaska exist. Here, we seek to deploy a range of equipment (automatic weather stations, ablation stakes, dGPS, etc.) on a debris-covered glacier in Alaska to improve our understanding of debris-covered glaciers and their response to climate change. There is a bit of flexibility in this project to adapt it to the PhD student's interest, but the student will be expected to combine the field data with computational models and/or upscale their work using remote sensing data. The student will also have the opportunity to be an integral member of the NASA HiMAT and SLCT teams. Given the remote nature of this fieldwork, experience (or strong desire/excitement) with backcountry camping and working in a rugged outdoor setting is needed.
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I wrote a new post for EGU's Cryosphere blog looking at how warm periods in Earth's history (due to Earth's climate cycles) have impacted the melt of the polar ice sheets and changed sea-level rise. Feel free to check it out below: http://blogs.egu.eu/divisions/cr/2017/09/01/image-of-the-week-learning-from-our-past/ Figure showing peak global mean temperature, atmospheric CO2, maximum global mean sea level, and sources of meltwater over the past 3 million years. The light blue area on each bar indicates uncertainty associated with the maximum global mean sea level, and the pie charts denote the fraction (not location) of ice retreat in Greenland and Antarctica [credit: Dutton et al. (2015)] Recently, I moved to Fairbanks, Alaska to begin a postdoc with Regine Hock at the University of Alaska. Leigh and I will be writing about our experience in Alaska. Check out the new blog page under the "Alaska" tab for our first post about our journey to Fairbanks.
A study that I conducted with Scott Watson (University of Leeds) and Daene McKinney has recently been published in the journal of Remote Sensing. The study assesses the hazard and risk associated with all of the sizable (> 0.1 km2) glacial lakes in Nepal. First, it seeks to determine how susceptible glacial lakes are to avalanches, rockfalls, and upstream floods in addition to assessing how stable the moraine is using a surrogate parameter. These are the most common triggering mechanisms that cause an outburst flood to occur. Then, the areal extent of each flood was also conservatively modeled, and the downstream impacts were quantified. Take a look at the following website:
You may recall from the Imja blog last summer that we witnessed a glacier outburst flood on 12 June 2016 and spent our subsequent days retracing the flood's path and trying to find its source. Well all that hard work paid off today as our research efforts were published in The Cryosphere! Special thanks to our research team: Alton Byers, Elizabeth Byers, Daene McKinney, and all those others who joined us! You can read it for free here: Or you can simply check out the video. Enjoy!
I contributed my second post for the EGU cryospheric sciences blog via their image of the week regarding work from my trip to Peru's Cordillera Blanca last night. Check it out! http://blogs.egu.eu/divisions/cr/ Check out a blog post I wrote for the EGU Crysopheric Sciences division summarizing my work at Imja this past June! Excited to be joining their blogging efforts!
http://blogs.egu.eu/divisions/cr/2016/07/28/fieldwork-at-5000-meters-in-altitude/ I'll be flying out of Kathmandu tomorrow, so the last blog post has been complete! It's been an incredible trip with a great group of people and I can't wait for the next one. Feel free to check out the old posts if you're interested in what we were doing up there!
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