SIO 199: Independent Research (Spring 2024)
Undergraduate course, University of California San Diego, Scripps Institution of Oceanography, 2024
I am currently supervising the SIO 199: Independent Research undergraduate student project “Grounding Zone Dynamics at the Eastern Margin of the Amery Ice Shelf: Gillock Island and Kreitzer Glacier” for my advisor Prof. Helen Fricker. My main duties are providing research direction and technical support for data retrieval, cloud computing and analysis.
In particular:
- Providing relevant background literature and associated code.
- Formulation of the main research question: Is it possible to use ICESat-2 observations of tidally induced ice shelf flexure to determine whether Gillock Island is fully ungrounded around its margins, transiently ungrounded during high tides, or fully connected to the grounded portion of the Antarctic Ice Sheet?
- Setting up the student with a local Jupyterlab environment for data analysis with Python, as well as on a cloud-native JupyterHub in AWS.
- Assisting data retrieval using Google Earth Engine, NSIDC’s API, and direct cloud access on AWS.
- Providing sample notebooks for getting started and utility functions for data access, processing and visualization.
- Python / Jupyter troubleshooting.