Where sea ice, ocean, and ice shelf meet: ice-ocean co-evolution along the Antarctic Amundsen Sea coast from SWOT using open cloud infrastructure

Principal Investigator: Tasha Snow (Earth System Science Interdisciplinary Center (ESSIC))

Co-Investigator(s): Susan Howard, Ellianna Abrahams, Matthew Siegfried

Collaborator(s): Laurie Padman, James Colliander

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The overarching motivation of this project is to improve understanding of processes linking the ocean, sea ice (ice formed on the ocean), and glaciers along the Antarctic coast through a fusion of NASA Surface Water and Ocean Topography (SWOT), NASA Ice, Cloud, and land Elevation Satellite 2 (ICESat-2), and visible and thermal-infrared (heat) imagery datasets.

Through this work we will improve the SWOT mission’s broader sea surface and glacier height uncertainty quantification and open-source cloud-computing capabilities. Within this overarching motivation we have four specific goals:

• Create time-varying sea surface and glacier height maps with verified and well-constrained geophysical corrections along the Antarctic coastline (e.g., tides, mean and dynamic ocean topography);
• Evaluate SWOT glacier and sea surface height uncertainties in the presence of sea ice using ICESat-2 laser altimetry surface measurements;
• Assess weather-band (few days) timescale fluctuations in near-ice-shelf circulation, ice, and ocean heat processes using a thermal and altimetry data fusion framework; and
• Broaden SWOT collaborative open-science and cloud-computing frameworks.