Biography

I am an Internal Research Fellow in ESRIN’s Science Hub specialising in the remote sensing of sea ice – the Earth’s frozen ocean surface. I did an undergraduate degree in Geophysics at University College London (UCL) in the UK, followed by a Masters in Science Media Production at Imperial College London. After two years working in the television industry I returned to UCL to do a PhD in Polar Remote Sensing. Before coming to ESA I held a post-doctoral position at the Centre for Polar Observation and Modelling at the University of Leeds.

Research

I use satellite data to monitor changes in Earth’s sea ice. My work aims to improve the methods by which we measure sea ice thickness from space, and assess how much the thickness and volume of Arctic and Antarctic sea ice have changed over recent decades in response to climate change. In my work I use data from a range of satellites including ESA’s CryoSat-2 and Sentinel-3 to better resolve the snow cover of sea ice and the extent to which radar energy penetrates the snow cover, both of which lead to better estimates of sea ice thickness and volume. I have done fieldwork in both the Arctic and Antarctica, most recently in December 2022 when I led an airborne campaign over sea ice in the Southern Ocean Weddell Sea.