NASA Postdoctoral Program - Big data remote sensing of glaciers and ice sheets

The NASA Postdoctoral Program (NPP) offers unique research opportunities to highly-talented scientists to engage in ongoing NASA research projects at a NASA Center, NASA Headquarters, or at a NASA-affiliated research institute. These one- to three-year fellowships are competitive and are designed to advance NASA's missions in space science, Earth science, aeronautics, space operations, exploration systems, and astrobiology. This specific research opportunity focuses on employing a suite of satellite data to build time series of observations of ice sheet dynamics and study their linkage with climate forcing. The work will utilize satellite radar interferometry (InSAR) platforms and optical platforms including ASI Cosmo-Skymed, ESA Sentinel-1ab, CSA RADARSAT-2, DLR Tandem-X SAR, NASA/ISRO NISAR, USGS Landsat-8, World View, ESA Sentinel-2, and NASA MODIS. These sensors span different repeat cycles, spatial resolutions, and collect vast amounts of data daily, representing the concept of remote sensing big data. The focus of this work will be on the Amundsen Sea sector of West Antarctica, where rapid glacier changes are taking place and contributing to sea level rise. The work will develop and implement a structural organization of the vast array of remote sensing data, develop and implement tools for data extraction, analysis, Machine Learning, and synthesis of understanding of the evolution of glaciers and ice sheets in a changing climate. The results will benefit conceptual and numerical modeling of ice sheet evolution in response to climate forcing. Candidates will work with researchers at JPL under the leadership of Prof. Eric Rignot and Dr. Eric Larour to develop advanced ways of analyzing satellite data and learn more about the physical processes controlling ice sheet evolution and subsequent impact on sea level rise.