How to widen our knowledge of ice marginal lake changes in Greenland, and provide a better understanding of how the terrestrial cryosphere can be represented in large scale models of global sea level change?

Penelope is a data scientist at the Geological Survey of Denmark and Greenland (GEUS) with a background in Glaciology. She graduated from Lancaster University with a first-class bachelor degree in Physical Geography in 2012, before undertaking an MSc (by research) examining geothermal controls on ice flow at a glacier in Iceland. Following this, she pursued a PhD in ice-ocean interactions at tidewater glaciers in Svalbard at the University of Edinburgh and the University Centre in Svalbard (UNIS).

After graduating in 2018, she continued developing her skills in photogrammetry and programming as a post-doctoral researcher at the University of York, and then moved to Asiaq Greenland Survey in Nuuk to take up a position as a remote sensing specialist. During this time, she was involved in various ESA projects, including the Glaciers CCI (Climate Change Initiative) Option 6 ice-marginal lake project and CCI+ Ice Sheets Greenland. Since moving to GEUS, Penelope works closely with the PROMICE and GC-NET monitoring programmes over the Greenland Ice Sheet.

Research objectives

• Integration of pre-existing SAR, optical and DEM lake detection methods (developed during the ESA CCI project, How et al., 2021) into a unified and open-source processing chain that can be implemented in cloud processing platforms;
• Examine changes in ice marginal lake abundance and extent across Greenland through the production of pan-Greenland inventories for selected years in the satellite era;
• Form detailed time-series of the dynamics of selected ice marginal lakes (using the finest temporal resolution possible), and examine changes in GLOF events over time;
• Evaluate estimates of lake extents from remote sensing against in situ observations from existing records, such as hydrological measurements and terrestrial time-lapse imagery.
  

Read more on the research project sheet.