Thesis topic: the response time of glaciers

Motivation

The concept of "glacier response time" is a traditional topic in glaciology. It can have various meanings and definitions across the literature, and it is crucial to help our understanding of past and future glacier change.

In this thesis, the student will have the difficult but highly rewarding task of characterizing the response time of all glaciers globally, using OGGM.

Specific goals

While the goals might (and will) evolve as a result of this work, I envision the thesis tasks as follows:

comprehensive literature of the concept of "response times" and their use in glaciology (either as simple descriptive measure, or quantitatively in statistical glacier evolution models)
idealized experiments with OGGM's flowline models to help better understand the factors which affect the response time
compute the "response time" of glaciers worldwide using OGGM
build a statistical model able to "predict" the response time of glaciers worldwide, under certain conditions. This statistical model will also allow inference (i.e. understanding what drives the response time).
use this model to better understand many aspects of the current problems we are working on with the OGGM team, such as:

Profile of the student

interested in glaciology
proficient in python programming
demonstrated good to very good grades in the climate / glaciology / programming lectures

Fabien's assessment of the topic

It is a very interesting and rewarding topic, but should be taken only by a student with a high researcher profile, i.e. able and willing to think out of the box, try new and innovative things.

OGGM / oggm