Sea-Ice field characteristic extraction using LiDAR

Description

This project investigates pipelines for extracting and estimating size, shape, and thickness of pancake ice floes from LiDAR scans of the sea ice field. This work feeds into the physical characterisation of sea ice parameters using LiDAR to improve parameterisation of Earth System Models. A LiDAR dataset was collected during the SCALE Winter 2022 cruise using a Livox AVIA LiDAR (https://www.livoxtech.com/avia) and will be used as the starting point for investigations.

These data will inform our understanding of ice floe dynamics. In addition, improved physical models of pancake sea ice will allow for improved wave estimation algorithms for ice-based inertial wave measurement.

Key skills/interests:

Strong mathematical and programming skills for the algorithm and pipeline development.

Expected outputs:

1x MSc (Eng), 1x Journal/Conference paper in a leading publication.

Supervisors:

James Hepworth and Robyn Verrinder