Seminar Series - Machine Learning, Satellite Observations, and the Cryosphere: A New Era - Professor Yara Mohajerani, University of Washington

Tuesday, March 30 at 2 p.m. via Zoom

Speaker: Professor Yara Mohajerani, Civil and Environmental Engineering, University of Washington

Abstract: It is of increasing importance to better understand and evaluate the behavior and changes of glaciers across the Earth's ice sheets, given a rapidly changing cryosphere and its associated effects such as sea level rise. At the same time, we are experiencing an ever-increasing volume of remote sensing observational data across the globe. Yet, many important glaciological features have so far been identified and tracked by painstaking and time-consuming manual techniques. This bottleneck in processing prevents the large-scale analysis of glacier dynamics that is necessary for an improved understanding of glacier mass balance and sea level rise. In this talk I will discuss recent work in developing deep learning frameworks that have enabled the analysis of many glaciers from large amounts of observational data to better understand glacier dynamics. Lastly, I will discuss some of the remaining challenges and future steps for improved automatic delineation of surface features.