Guest Experts: Dr. Bonnie Light & Dr. Maddie Smith
Date of Webinar: January 21, 2021 at 5pm Eastern
Topic/Title: Earth’s frozen oceans: properties and importance of sea ice
Description: Sea ice forms a frozen lid on much of the earth’s Polar oceans. The properties of this ice play a large role not only in the ocean, but also the global climate. In this presentation, we’ll introduce the unique and interesting features of sea ice, including its high reflectivity (“albedo”). We’ll introduce the ways we measure these properties in remote polar oceans and use these observations to improve computer climate models.
Guest Expert Bios: Dr. Bonnie Light is a Principal Scientist at the Polar Science Center at the University of Washington in Seattle. She studies sea ice in the Arctic basin through a combination of laboratory work in a walk-in freezer, computer modeling, and field studies. Her primary research interests lie in understanding the optical, structural, and chemical properties of sea ice. These interests have led to collaborative projects involving direct measurements of the partitioning of sunlight by sea ice, the physics of very cold sea ice on Snowball Earth, structural properties of melting sea ice in the context of its habitability, and freezing chemistry in soils on Mars. She has participated in six field campaigns on Arctic sea ice and frequently engages in educational outreach opportunities.
Dr. Maddie Smith is a postdoctoral scholar at the Polar Science Center. She first dreamt of exploring the polar oceans while learning about Fridtjof Nansen’s transpolar drift as an undergrad at Bowdoin College in Maine. Her research now combines observations taken in the Arctic and Antarctic with modeling approaches to better understand the interactions of sea ice with the ocean, and the implications in climate models.
You can view the recording of this webinar on the NOSB’s YouTube channel, theNOSB.
