PostDoctoral Research Fellowship

Goldberg Daniel N, Princeton NJ

Investigators

Abstract

Goldberg/1103375 This award supports a postdoctoral fellowship to develop a modeling strategy to help address one of the largest sources of uncertainty regarding future sea-level rise (SLR) over the next several centuries that of the contribution of the West Antarctic ice sheet (WAIS). Current ice sheet models are ill equipped to reduce this uncertainty because many of the determining factors of its flow are difficult or impossible to observe directly. In addition the influence of the internal state of the ice is not properly assessed and there is a need to characterize the uncertainty associated with the current state of WAIS, and to improve current data assimilation techniques. This post-doctoral researcher supported by this award will use a new large-scale thermo-mechanical ice model, capable of modeling WAIS and will incorporate an adjoint to the model using automatic differentiation techniques together with analytic methods. The adjoint will be used to answer questions regarding the relative influence of internal ice temperature and oceanic forcing on WAIS evolution, and to infer time-dependent basal behavior using satellite data (something not currently done). The host scientist will be Dr. Patrick Heimbach of MIT, whose pioneering work in the generation and use of adjoints in climate modeling will be invaluable. The intellectual merit of the proposed work is the advent of adjoints to time-dependent ice models, which promises improvements in data assimilation and in our understanding of ice sheet dynamics. The broader impact of the proposed work is quantification of the largest sources of uncertainty of future contributions of land ice to SLR, which could inform policy decisions and guide future fieldwork campaigns.