NASA selects UCI’s Isabella Velicogna for interdisciplinary Sea Level Change Team

Melting polar ice is causing sea levels to rise around the world, but how much of an increase will the future bring, and where? These are the key questions to be addressed by Isabella Velicogna, UCI Earth system scientist, as a recently named member of NASA’s Sea Level Change Team. She and her research group will work to reduce the uncertainty in global and local sea-level estimates using data from a variety of sources, including the European Space Agency’s CryoSat mission and NASA’s ICESat, GRACE and Operation IceBridge missions. “To face the grand challenge of predicting future sea-level rise, our team will develop new probabilistic global and local sea-level projections that smoothly link state-of-the-art physical models with observations of sea-level and ice-sheet changes,” Velicogna said. “I am proud to have been selected by NASA to become a member of this team with a vitally important mission.” Among her interdisciplinary teammates are experts from Old Dominion University Research Foundation; NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center; Arizona State University; the University of Colorado Boulder; the University of Alaska Fairbanks; and NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory. Their chief goal is to develop new tools, data sets and scientific insights to be included in NASA’s publicly accessible web portal for sea-level change data, launched in December 2015.