CR
Cryospheric Sciences

Clara Burgard

Clara Burgard is a postdoctoral researcher at the Institut des Géosciences et de l'Environnement (IGE) in Grenoble. She currently investigates melt parametrizations at the base of Antarctic ice shelves as part of the H2020 PROTECT project. Before that, she did her PhD on investigating sea ice in climate simulations and comparing it to sea ice observed by satellites. She tweets as @climate_clara.

Image of the Week – The Polar Hole!

October 14, 2016
Image of the Week – The Polar Hole!
Figure 1: Mean sea-ice thickness for November 2010 from CryoSat-2 satellite measurements. [Credit: The data processing of CryoSat-2 sea-ice thickness is funded by the German Federal Ministry for Economic Affairs and Energy (Funding: 50EE1008) and data of November 2010 are provided by meereisportal.de (Funding: REKLIM-2013-04) ].

Have you ever stumbled upon a satellite picture showing observations of the Arctic or Antarctic? You often see a circle where there is no data around the exact location of the geographic pole – as you can see in our Image of the Week. A few days ago, I wanted to explain this to one of my friends and turned to my favourite search engine for help. My search turned up a tremendous amount of sto ...[Read More]

Image of the Week – The Journey of a Snowflake

September 2, 2016
Image of the Week – The Journey of a Snowflake
Figure 1: Snowflakes viewed with a low temperature scanning electron microscope (SEM). [ Credit : Agricultural Research Service, United States Department of Agriculture via Wikimedia ]

You remember last winter, when everything was white and you had so much fun building a snowman with your friends? What you see on this image above, is what you would see, if you took a tiny tiny piece of your snowman and put it under a low-temperature scanning electron microscope (SEM). The colours are called “pseudo colours”, they are computer generated based on the number of electron ...[Read More]

Image of the Week – See How Seasonal Sea Ice Decline Differs!

May 13, 2016
Image of the Week – See How Seasonal Sea Ice Decline Differs!
Figure 1: Arctic sea-ice area (75°N to 90°N) VS global annual mean surface air temperature for the complex model MPI-ESM-LR. Red dots represent a seasonal average over autumn (September/October/November) and blue dots over spring (March/April/May) of a particular year in the historical and future (RCP8.5) simulations. The dotted black lines result from a linear orthogonal regression in the ice area regime with the steepest change (Credit: subset of fig 2 from Bathiany et al, 2016 ).

Why do we care about sea ice in the first place? Sea ice is important for several components of the climate system. Due to its high albedo, sea ice reflects a high amount of the incoming solar radiation and is therefore relevant for the Earth’s energy budget. Sea ice inhibits the exchange of heat, moisture and momentum between ocean and atmosphere, which usually occur at the sea surface. Whe ...[Read More]