Event

In March 2023 two of our M³OCCA PhD students, Lena Krabbe from LHFT/ FAU Erlangen and Akash Patil from BAdW Munich, joined a three-week field test campaign taking place at the Jungfraufirn on the Aletsch glacier in Switzerland. Therein, they were able to collect multiple data sets from different Ground Penetrating Radar (GPR) systems, namely a commercial GPR system as well as a GPR sled developed by Lena Krabbe at LHFT.  Field campaigns like this are an essential part of glacier and ice research in order to assess the system performance in the field as well as to check, whether the systems and solutions developed in the lab are also capable of enduring extreme environmental conditions that are present on glaciers. Moreover, the collected data is a great basis for a performance comparison not only between the two surface-based GPR systems, but also for comparing them to further measurement equipment tested during this field campaign. The latter includes a melting probe consisting of a radar, a sonar and a permittivity sensor as well as UAV-based radar and lidar systems. During the field test, two main measurement sites were evaluated, including an area close to the Mönchsjoch as well as the camp site below the Sphinx, which is also close to the glacier entrance. Furthermore, also more remote places where evaluated after being explored and assessed together with a mountain guide. Overall, this field test was a great opportunity to gain experience in applied glacier research and intensify the collaboration inside the M³OCCA doctoral program.

In addition to our bi-weekly M3OCCA seminar lectures, we invited Jürgen Merz to present his “Glacier project”.

He is a photographer specializing in abstract art. Within his “Glacier project”, he documented the fragile beauty and changes of alpine glaciers.

More information: https://www.abstract-landscape.com/

The Institute of Geography at FAU Erlangen-Nürnberg will host an invited talk by Dr. Samuel Cook (Univ. Lausanne).

When: Wednesday, 17.05.2023, 12:30-14:00

Where: Seminar room, Wetterkreuz 15, 91058 Erlangen

Abstract:

I present my ongoing work using the emulator from the Instructed Glacier Model (IGM) (https://github.com/jouvetg/igm) to invert for ice thickness at the 200,000 glaciers in the world outside the polar ice sheets. The basis of the emulator is a convolutional neural network trained on the outputs of full-Stokes simulations of real glaciers. Provided with surface velocities – taken from the new global dataset compiled by Millan et al. (2022) – and surface DEMs, this emulator can invert for thickness at any glacier in the world with a comparable accuracy to traditional full-Stokes inversion, but at a fraction of the computational cost. This allows us to greatly improve our estimates of global glacier volume, vital both for prediction of sea-level rise, but also for local communities in mountainous areas, who often rely on glacier melt for a large proportion of their water resources. I will discuss the rationale and methods behind my work, as well as preliminary results and the problems I’m currently working on.

In cooperation with the library of FAU, we organized a two days workshop.

It covered various topics like scientific data and literature management as well as open access publishing and bibliometry.

The first annual Retreat within the IDP M3OCCA took place at “Studienzentrum Josefstal” in early November 2022.

During the workshop, all Ph.D. students provided an overview of their individual PhD projects with subsequent discussions.

Additionally, further steps within the IDP M3OOCA program were discussed and defined.

Right to the beginning of the IDP M3OCCA, we organized a “kick-off” workshop at FAU Erlangen in June 2022.

The workshop was the first gathering of all IDP M3OCCA Ph.D. students, including affiliated Ph.D. students. Many subproject supervisors were also around, so the workshop provided the fundament for a fruitful exchange and collaboration between all different institutions involved in the IDP M3OCCA.