PhD position in Remote Sensing of the Cryosphere (1.0 FTE)

Mass loss from the Greenland Ice Sheet (GrIS) is currently the largest contributor to global sea level rise. Remote sensing satellites have revolutionized our understanding of the mass balance of the GrIS. Since 2010, the ESA CryoSat-2 radar altimetry mission provides a dense coverage of elevation changes of the GrIS. Yet, the use of radar altimetry comes at a price: the signal may penetrate into the snowpack, introducing an ambiguity in the origin of the reflected echo. In this project, funded by the The Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research (NWO), the successful candidate will develop an adaptive processing chain (retracker) that adjusts to the properties of the observed surface and minimizes this ambiguity. The improved elevation observations will be used to generate high-resolution time series of mass changes of the Greenland Ice Sheet. In the second phase of the project, a method will be developed to merge the CryoSat-2 observations with those of the upcoming ICESat-2 mission, based on Bayesian statistics to address to inherent difference in sampling of the two missions.

The project will be carried out within the Ice and Climate group of the Institute for Marine and Atmospheric research Utrecht (IMAU).