Englacial is building open-source tools to accelerate our understanding of the Antarctic and Greenland Ice Sheets, with support from Astera.
Antarctica and Greenland are changing rapidly. Melting ice sheets contribute to sea level rise, which increases the risks of flooding and puts every coastal town and its infrastructure at risk. While we know sea levels are rising, deep uncertainty remains about how much sea level rise we should expect in the coming decades.
Our goal is to make critical observational data available to support numerical models used to predict the evolution of Earth’s ice sheets. We do this by recovering data, building tools for easy and reproducible data access, and building open-source instrumentation to bring down the cost of new data collection.
We believe in open science and open engineering. You can find all of our work on GitHub. To the maximum extent possible, we do our work in the open, encourage others to extend it, and faciliate unrestricted access to scientific data.
Englacial is an internal project of Astera. Our work is only possible because of their generous support.
Stratospheric Radar Sounding
Crewed aircraft and even low-altitude UAVs are limited by weather and complex logistics in Antarctica. Stratospheric UAVs can provide low-cost, multi-month radar sounder data collection.
xOPR Data Access Tooling
xOPR is a library for easy, reproducible access to polar radar sounder data in the Python data ecosystem. xOPR provides access to a library of more than 2 PB of polar radar sounder data in the Open Polar Radar catalog.
Living Data Products
Living data products are derived data pipelines, built as open-source software tools. We've funded 5 teams to build reproducible data pipelines that transform observational data into model-ready data products.
Read about grantees here