Job description

Keywords
Icebergs, sea ice, synthetic aperture radar, Sentinel-1, spatio-temporal statistics, Barents Sea

PhD research
I study the spatial and temporal distribution of icebergs and sea ice in the Barents Sea. A part of this work focuses on the detection and characterization of icebergs, using synthetic aperture radar (SAR) data, in particular derived from the Sentinel-1 satellites. We aim at linking multi-year Sentinel-1 iceberg and sea ice statistics to climatic variables. Furthermore, the iceberg and sea ice observations shall be used to calibrate and validate iceberg and sea ice drift and deterioration models in the broader project context.

Research project
The PhD is part of the RareIce project that is led by the NTNU Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering and funded by the Norwegian Research Council. The project aims to model rare iceberg and sea ice occurrences in the southern Barents Sea. These rare ice occurrences may pose an environmental threat, if interferring with human activities in this area. Observations derived from remote sensing data are used to calibrate and validate numerical models that may predict the iceberg and sea ice drift and deterioration beyond the observational coverage.