iHARP Talks and Presentations

BALTIMORE – Sea levels are rising due to the effects of global warming, posing a serious threat to coastal life around the world, as flooding becomes more frequent and storms become more intense.

The Chesapeake Bay is one of the most vulnerable regions in the nation.

“It’s very urgent,” said Dr. Vandana Janeja, from the the University of Maryland, Baltimore County. “There’s even a society of concerned scientists that has done a study where they’ve seen many of the communities getting impacted by 2035.”

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Tens of millions of people live in areas that are at risk for flooding due to climate change, sea level rise, and melting of glaciers. UMBC’s Vandana Janeja, professor and chair of information systems, is leading a team of researchers using data science, machine learning, artificial intelligence (AI), and polar science to analyze enormous volumes of climate data and Arctic and Antarctic observations in ways that could help populations prepare for and respond to these risks.

The NSF HDR Institute for Harnessing Data and Model Revolution in the Polar Regions (iHARP) is supported by a five-year, $13 million grant from the National Science Foundation’s Harnessing the Data Revolution (HDR) Big Idea program.

Janeja is working with co-PIs Jianwu Wang, associate professor of information systems at UMBC; Mathieu Morlighem at Dartmouth College; Shashi Shekhar at the University of Minnesota; and researchers from the University of Colorado Boulder. Project partners in education, government, and industry across the country include additional collaborators at the above universities as well as University of Alaska Fairbanks, University of Northern Texas, Amherst College, University of Texas at Austin, NASA Universities Space Research Association, NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory, NVIDIA, IBM, and Amazon.

The landscape hidden under thousands of meters of ice around the South pole remains one of the least known places on Earth. It has, however, a critical impact on the stability of the ice sheet as climate warms. We show here how we accidently developed a new method to determine the shape of the bedrock by combining satellite and airborne data with simple physics: the conservation of mass. We discovered major features, such as the deepest canyon on land on Earth, that have major consequences on the stability of the Antarctic ice sheet and therefore on global sea level rise. Dr. Morlighem received his PhD from Ecole Centrale Paris in 2011 in partnership with the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory and is today a Professor of Earth System Science at the University of California Irvine. His research is focused on predicting how much Greenland and Antarctica will contribute to sea level over the next centuries. Dr. Morlighem received several awards, including the 2014 NASA Cryospheric Sciences Most Valuable Player award. This talk was given at a TEDx event using the TED conference format but independently organized by a local community. Learn more at https://www.ted.com/tedx