Polar climate scientist - exploring the causes and consequences of sea ice change using climate models, remote sensing and AI

Research Scientist at the Earth System Science Interdisciplinary Center (ESSIC) of the University of Maryland.

I use satellite altimetry, climate models, and AI to measure polar sea ice, improve seasonal predictions, and help design the next generation of Earth observing missions.

Current research

• Better projections of polar climate change using sea ice observations from NASA's ICESat-2 mission, including ongoing Arctic sea ice thickness analysis.
• Fusion of ICESat-2 (laser altimeter) and SMAP (L-band) data for enhanced sea ice profiling from space.
• Improved seasonal sea ice melt prediction using data assimilation, including PREFIRE radiance observations.
• Observing System Simulation Experiments (OSSEs) to define sea ice and land ice altimetry requirements for a future NASA surface topography mission.
• High-resolution commercial satellite imagery for ICESat-2 sea ice surface classification (Co-I).

Science teams and service

• ICESat-2 Science Team (member since 2023; data product lead 2021–2022)
• SMAP Science Team (since 2024)
• PREFIRE Science Team (since 2026)
• NASA surface topography / STV Science Team (since 2022)
• IPCC AR7 Working Group I, Chapter 4, contributing author

Strong proponent of open science — data, code, and papers are in the tabs above. I am also fascinated by the power of AI to accelerate science, and a bit impatient about how slowly academia is talking about it; some thoughts in the blog.

See my CV, Google Scholar, GitHub, ORCID, and LinkedIn.

akpetty@umd.edu