How can we automate future gridded Antarctic ice-sheet and bed mapping?

As new airborne surveys of the Antarctic ice sheet are completed, the ever-enlarging survey dataset provides an opportunity for generating new ‘Bedmaps’ of ice thickness, surface and bed topography. These surveys are fundamental to improving our ability to predict the future of Antarctica, but other data-analysis challenges emerge because surveys often do not agree, large data gaps remain, the ice thickness changes or interpolation works well for one landscape but not another. Similar problems afflict other key Bedmap components: the coastline, the grounding line, rock outcrops, the ice shelves and the bathymetry. The process of merging the interpolated ice sheets and shelves and the grounded bed with the sea floor can also inject spurious cliffs and bumps in the grounding zone—exactly where ice-sheet models are most sensitive to flaws in their boundary conditions. In each case, unintended errors and artefacts that arise in the Bedmap grids require careful checking, correction and sometimes bespoke, local approaches to interpolation, slowing the process further. Here, I highlight the key challenges to overcome and address the question of how future Bedmaps can be automated to speed up the supply of new datasets demanded by the ice-sheet modelling community.

This article is part of the Theo Murphy meeting issue ‘Next generation ice-sheet bed measurements’.