Challenges and opportunities of big data in Glaciology Seminar

The explosion of data and computing power that is now available to glaciologists presents significant opportunities for advancing the field’s understanding of glaciated regions. However, significant barriers exist to achieving this, with the scales and rates at which data are being generated rendering many traditional approaches to analysis impractical. In this talk I will introduce two examples of work where we have been able to leverage rapid access to (and processing of) significant volumes of remote sensing data through the Google Earth Engine cloud computing platform to achieve previously unattainable insights into glacial environments. This will include discussion of how rapid data access coupled with manual analysis has uncovered common modes of behaviour in the retreat of marine terminating ice margins across all Greenland, and how automated image analysis that identifies Greenland’s supraglacial lakes at daily resolution for 2000-2019 has revealed their evolution at ice sheet scale for the first time.

Speaker Information

Dr James M Lea, University of Liverpool