New paper out: Direct measurement of optical properties of glacier ice using a photon-counting diffuse LiDAR

My recent work on developing a novel sensor for measuring the properties of glacier ice just appeared online in the Journal of Glaciology, published through Cambridge University Press! The project - a collaboration with researchers from the Department of Geography and the Oregon Glacier Institute - started about a year ago with funding from the University of Oregon. The Renee James Seed Grant Initiative provided me with the time and money to develop and test the instrument and do the field work. We did not only test the instrument on Oregon’s Collier Glacier, but learn valuable lessons about the mechanisms that lead to absorption of solar radiation in glacier ice, which accounts for the majority of melt. Some of these results apply not just to local glaciers in the Cascades, but all glaciers: As we can now differentiate between albedo contributions from structure (i.e. bubble density and size) and composition (impurities such as algae and soot), we came to understand that ice albedo is more sensitive to contamination than snow, which raises the question how much of the impurity content of snow gets incorporated in glacier ice.

The article is now available online: https://doi.org/10.1017/jog.2022.34