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.

Current projects (as Principal Investigator):

• Better projections of polar climate change using state-of-the-art sea ice observations from NASA's ICESat-2 mission (Science Team member as of 2023, data product lead from 2021-2022).
• Fusion of ICESat-2 (laser altimeter) and SMAP (L-band) data for enhanced sea ice profiling from space (Science Team member since 2024).
• Improved predictions of seasonal sea ice melt using new data assimilation approaches and model assessments.
• Advancing polar sea ice prediction with PREFIRE radiance observations and next-generation data assimilation methods.
• On-going updates to the analysis of Arctic sea ice thickness from ICESat-2 altimetry data.
• New Observing System Simulation Experiments (OSSEs) to define sea ice and land ice altimetry requirements from a future NASA surface topography mission (Science Team member since 2022).

Current projects (as Co-Investigator):

• Leveraging high resolution commercial satellite imagery for ICESat-2 sea ice surface classification validation.

See my complete Academic CV here.

Alternatively, scroll the tabs above or check out my Google Scholar (journal papers), GitHub (open source code repos), ORCID (a confusing website summarizing research output) and my LinkedIn.

Strong proponent and practitioner of Open Science. See the Data and Code tabs and GitHub links included in the Papers tab.

Fascinated and fully convinced of the power of AI to accelerate science, confused by the lack of appreciation and conversations we are having about this in academia.

akpetty@umd.edu