Welcome to the first edition of the CryoHackathon organised by the Early Career Glaciologist Group (EGG) of the International Glaciological Society (IGS), which will run from the 17th - 19th February 2023!:partying_face: :partying_face:
The overall aim of this event is for all participants to have fun across an exciting weekend, collaborating together on exciting projects linked to the cryosphere, in a nice, inclusive and respectful atmosphere! Anyone is more than welcome to participate, and no coding experience is required! 😃
If you are not registered yet and would like to participate, don't hesitate to fill this form! ✍️
- Format 💻
- Schedule 📆
- CryoHackathon Challenges 📢
- Inter-community Challenges 📢
- Useful resources ℹ️
- Support team 👨💻👩🏽💻👩💻👨🏽💻
- Contributors ✨
- Partners 🥳
The format is very simple! 🤓
Teams of 1 to 5 participants will work on a cryosphere-related project of their choice: This project can be built from scratch, inspired from the pool of ideas listed further below, based around existing projects or even as part of a course project! You can basically choose to work on anything as long as there is a slim link to the cryosphere! Again, the primary goal is for everyone to have fun in a nice, respectful and inclusive atmosphere! 😃😃😃
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January 17th 2023 Opening of the CryoHackathon Discord channel where participants can meet and begin to form teams!
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Friday February 17th
- 4:00pm UTC Launch of the CryoHackathon 2023, beginning with a presentation by the organising team to kick things off.
- 4:30pm UTC Presentation by the Sentinel Hub team, who are our partner for this event.
- 5:00pm UTC Teams assemble and begin working on their projects!
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Saturday February 18th
- 10:00am UTC Coffee break with our special group of mentors (see below), as well as the organising team for those who could use some additional motivation, help or simply would like a change of scenery!
- 04:00pm UTC Afternoon coffee break with the team to get everyone ready for the Saturday night hack!
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Sunday February 19th
- 4:00pm UTC Cryohackathon 2023 closing ceremony (sad emoji?)
- 4:30pm UTC Project presentations
- 6:00pm UTC Award ceremony!
One option that groups have when it comes to deciding their own projects is to choose from one of the three Cryo Challenges listed below that were created specifically for this Hackathon! These are only ideas - they can be starting points for your own ideas, and all three can easily be merged into one if you wish!
Pick the frozen area of your choice (glacier ice, snow, sea ice, permafrost...), and study how it is evolving through time! This could be an area or region you particularly like, one you're currently studying, one you’ve always wanted to, or even one that you realized hasn't really been investigated in the past... Just pick the one you like! 😃 For your chosen case study, you can then use a variety of data sets, including satellite data (e.g. provided by Sentinel Hub, the partner of this Hackathon) and model results to undertaken your (re)analysis! Again, no coding experience is required: you could decide to manually outline and/or track features, or even go for a report/literature review on the different studies and associated knowledge gaps in this area!
Have you always been interested in this one process, but never had the time/opportunity to study it in detail? Well now here's your chance! For this Cryo Challenge, you could develop your own small research project focused on understanding the different processes, and see how far you get during the Hackathon! Interestingly, many small projects that are initiated during hackathons end up way bigger after the event and can sometimes even be the starting point for large collaborations, and this could be the case for yours!
So, you're into algorithms, methods and/or software development, and want to use your skills to create a new tool which can be applied to cryospheric sciences? This could be a detection algorithm, a graphical user interface, a model (or anything else!)... Just get started and have fun! 🥳
The remote sensing working group of the Association of Polar Early Career Scientists (APECS) is currently developing a database with the aim of making it easier to access, download and use satellite data! To this end, the team is currently gathering information about all the satellites currently being used in polar sciences to aid in building this very useful resource! You could contribute to this project by adding new satellites and/or missing information!
Communication between the organisers, the mentors and the participants will
primarily take place on the IGS EGG Discord Channel, more specifically
in the #cryohackathon22 channel. Don't hesitate to use it to
communicate with your team too!
Sentinel Hub, our awesome partner for this first edition of the CryoHackathon, are kindly providing a free Sentinel Hub account to all participants during the Hackathon! 🥳 🥳
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Sentinel Hub EO Browser: an efficient and easy-to-use graphical user interface to browse through Sentinel, Landsat and many other satellite data sets. Images over your study area can also be downloaded directly on this platform.
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Earthspy: A Python wrapper package to make the download of satellite data easier. In 3 lines of Python code, you can download data from your small study area on a specific date to worldwide data sets throughout the satellite era!
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Climate Copernicus Data Store: A web interface to easily download many widely-used data sets such as ERA5, ESA land cover products, as well as many satellite-derived products!
For this Hackathon, we have put together an awesome team of mentors who will do their best to help you as much as possible in your project if you feel the need for it! Don't hesitate to contact them before, during (and even after!) the Hackathon, as they are here to help and possibly give you an outside perspective on your ideas!
Clara Henry @henryclara
Clara is a PhD student at the Max Planck Institute for Meteorology and the University of Tübingen in Germany. She is interested in fluid dynamics and numerical modelling, and combines her academic background in mathematics with her interest in physics and coding to investigate features called ice rises which are found in coastal Antarctica. She uses the numerical model Elmer/Ice which is written in Fortran, but does most of her post-processing using Python.
Johannes Landmann @jlandmann
Johannes obtained a PhD in Glaciology from ETH Zürich for combining mass balance ensemble modeling, remote sensing, and data assimilation in a novel way. He is passionate about streaming information from different sources to obtain optimum estimates of cryosphere quantities. He is the developer of glaciersat, a tool for (operational) remote sensing analysis of glaciers, and sharpens his scientific development skills now at MeteoSwiss.
Clara Burgard @ClimateClara
Clara is a postdoc at the Institut des Géosciences de l'Environnement of the University of Grenoble Alpes. She is interested in modelling the climate in polar regions, especially the interactions between ocean and ice. Her favourite cryospheric elements are therefore sea ice and ice shelves. She is used to handling large datasets from climate models, using cdo and xarray, and has also worked with satellite datasets and reanalyses. In her PhD and her postdoc, she has built two python packages: a tool to convert sea-ice simulations to brightness temperatures (ARC3O) and a collection of the most commonly used basal melt parameterisations for Antarctic ice shelves (multimelt).
Adrien Wehrlé @AdrienWehrle
Adrien is a PhD student at the University of Zurich, Switzerland where he's studying the dynamics of Greenland outlet glaciers as well as the evolution of the surface process across the ice sheet. He's into anything coding, software and algorithm development, data science and earth observation! He's also the developer of Earthspy so don't hesitate to ask him any question if you're considering using it!
William D. Harcourt @wdharcourt1
Will is a Lecturer at the University of Aberdeen (soon to be a Research Fellow!). He studies glacier change across the Arctic using Earth Observation methods and develops innovative techniques to achieve this. Will leads the creation of the APECS Polar Earth Database and is also an active member of the Svalbard Integrated Arctic Earth Observing System (SIOS) Remote Sensing Working Group (RSWG). He is particularly keen to facilitate hackathon projects that makes use of the data sets collected as part of the SIOS consortium!
The CryoHackathon is organised by the Early Glaciologists Group committee of the International Glaciological Society and several EGG friends. All contributors are listed below following the all-contributors specification.
 Adrien Wehrlé |
 Clara Henry |
 Johannes Landmann |
 Clara Burgard |
 Nathaniel Baurley |
 PiM |
 William Harcourt |
SentinelHub, an award winning satellite imagery service, cloud data driver to Sentinel, Landsat and other imagery, is the partner of this edition of the CryoHackathon.
- First prize: a one-year subscription to Sentinel Hub services (Entreprise S, worth 5000 euros)!
- Second prize: a 200 euro grant to attend the Cryosphere conference of your choice!
- Third Prize: IGS EGG mugs and stickers for each group member (the real prize…😃)