Morphological approaches to understanding Antarctic Sea ice thickness

Thesis: Ph. D., Joint Program in Applied Ocean Physics and Engineering (Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Department of Aeronautics and Astronautics; and the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution), 2020

Bibliographic Details
Main Author: Mei, M. Jeffrey(Ming-Yi Jeffrey)
Other Authors: Ted Maksym.
Format: Thesis
Language:eng
Published: Massachusetts Institute of Technology 2021
Subjects:
Online Access:https://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/129062
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author Mei, M. Jeffrey(Ming-Yi Jeffrey)
author2 Ted Maksym.
author_facet Ted Maksym.
Mei, M. Jeffrey(Ming-Yi Jeffrey)
author_sort Mei, M. Jeffrey(Ming-Yi Jeffrey)
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description Thesis: Ph. D., Joint Program in Applied Ocean Physics and Engineering (Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Department of Aeronautics and Astronautics; and the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution), 2020
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spelling mit-1721.1/1290622021-01-06T03:45:08Z Morphological approaches to understanding Antarctic Sea ice thickness Mei, M. Jeffrey(Ming-Yi Jeffrey) Ted Maksym. Joint Program in Applied Ocean Physics and Engineering. Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Department of Mechanical Engineering. Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution. Joint Program in Applied Ocean Physics and Engineering Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Department of Mechanical Engineering Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution Joint Program in Applied Ocean Physics and Engineering. Mechanical Engineering. Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution. Thesis: Ph. D., Joint Program in Applied Ocean Physics and Engineering (Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Department of Aeronautics and Astronautics; and the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution), 2020 Cataloged from student-submitted PDF of thesis. Includes bibliographical references (pages 181-198). Sea ice thickness has long been an under-measured quantity, even in the satellite era. The snow surface elevation, which is far easier to measure, cannot be directly converted into sea ice thickness estimates without knowledge or assumption of what proportion of the snow surface consists of snow and ice. We do not fully understand how snow is distributed upon sea ice, in particular around areas with surface deformation. Here, we show that deep learning methods can be used to directly predict snow depth, as well as sea ice thickness, from measurements of surface topography obtained from laser altimetry. We also show that snow surfaces can be texturally distinguished, and that texturally-similar segments have similar snow depths. This can be used to predict snow depth at both local (sub-kilometer) and satellite (25 km) scales with much lower error and bias, and with greater ability to distinguish inter-annual and regional variability than current methods using linear regressions. We find that sea ice thickness can be estimated to <20% error at the kilometer scale. The success of deep learning methods to predict snow depth and sea ice thickness suggests that such methods may be also applied to temporally/spatially larger datasets like ICESat-2. by M. Jeffrey Mei. Ph. D. Ph.D. Joint Program in Applied Ocean Physics and Engineering (Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Department of Aeronautics and Astronautics; and the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution) 2021-01-05T23:16:08Z 2021-01-05T23:16:08Z 2020 2020 Thesis https://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/129062 1227042555 eng MIT theses may be protected by copyright. Please reuse MIT thesis content according to the MIT Libraries Permissions Policy, which is available through the URL provided. http://dspace.mit.edu/handle/1721.1/7582 198 pages application/pdf Massachusetts Institute of Technology
spellingShingle Joint Program in Applied Ocean Physics and Engineering.
Mechanical Engineering.
Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution.
Mei, M. Jeffrey(Ming-Yi Jeffrey)
Morphological approaches to understanding Antarctic Sea ice thickness
title Morphological approaches to understanding Antarctic Sea ice thickness
title_full Morphological approaches to understanding Antarctic Sea ice thickness
title_fullStr Morphological approaches to understanding Antarctic Sea ice thickness
title_full_unstemmed Morphological approaches to understanding Antarctic Sea ice thickness
title_short Morphological approaches to understanding Antarctic Sea ice thickness
title_sort morphological approaches to understanding antarctic sea ice thickness
topic Joint Program in Applied Ocean Physics and Engineering.
Mechanical Engineering.
Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution.
url https://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/129062
work_keys_str_mv AT meimjeffreymingyijeffrey morphologicalapproachestounderstandingantarcticseaicethickness