Dorothée Vallot

Associated SVALI phD student

Dorothée Vallot has started her PhD in february 2013 at the University of Uppsala. Her supervision comes from a collaboration between the department or Earth Science and the department of Information Technology and Scientific Computing. She will focus on modeling basal conditions under an arctic ice body influencing accelerating ice flow of outlet glaciers.

Her PhD project is based on numerical modeling of the dynamics of outlet glaciers from ice caps and ice sheets, with a particular focus on Vestfonna ice cap in Svalbard. The key processes are not well understood today. At present in all existing ice flow models, the treatment of the interaction between water, sediment and ice at the lower boundary is very simplified. The current models handle glacier sliding in a parameterized way and we suggest developing and incorporating the governing physics for the basal boundary in an existing full Stokes model called ELMER/ice.

More specifically, her project goals will be:

•  Investigate sensitivity of different constituent parameters in existing sliding law by comparing model output with ice velocities derived from satellite data to validate sliding laws,

•  Investigate the use of inverse methods to estimate basal properties and use these in prognostic runs on Vestfonna Ice Cap, Svalbard to investigate effects of basal conditions on the ice discharge and help developing more realistic prognostic runs to predict future behaviors.

•  Improve the treatment of the boundary layer conditions at the base of the glacier by developing a sediment deformation model coupled with an existing subglacial hydrology model. This will first be implemented in a simpler model setup and later in the full set of ELMER/Ice.

•  Implement the improved model on Vestfonna and compare with model runs using simplified sliding law/inverse methods and with ice velocities derived from satellite data and field observations.

•  Implement the improved model to investigate the effects of different basal conditions on the extent and dynamics of an outlet glacier and how these affect discharge of mass into the ocean.

Short CV

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