Dr Jason Roberts: BE (Hons), PhD
Research interests
I am a mechanical engineer by training, receiving my PhD from the University of Tasmania in 1998, specialising in numerical and experimental fluid dynamics. Since then I have worked as a numerical oceanography and a climate system modeller. In 2007 I ventured into glaciology, first as an ice sheet modeller before turning to ice core research.
My research uses ice core climate records to study and reconstruct both Antarctic and Australian climate. The annual amount of snowfall and the concentration of impurities (such as sea-salts) contained within the ice have been used to reconstruct snowfall across all of Antarctica, rainfall in both South West Western Australia and Eastern Australia and large scale climate modes such as the Interdecadial Pacific Oscillation.
In addition to my ice core work, I am the Australian lead for a large international collaboration (ICECAP – International Collaborative Exploration of the Cryosphere through Airborne Profiling) to survey the East Antarctic icesheet, to obtain critical information used by numerical icesheet models to predict the evolution of the Antarctic icesheet. Key properties measured are the thickness of the icesheet, the depth of the underlying bedrock and the presence of any liquid water at the base which may lubricate the movement of the ice over the underlying bedrock.
I have spent several summers in Antarctic, both in remote field camps drilling ice cores at Aurora Basin North, Mount Brown South and Law Dome, and station based for the ICECAP aircraft surveys of the East Antarctic icesheet.
Current projects
- #4511: ICECAP – EAGLE
- #4537: East Antarctic Synthesis of Ice cores (EASI) - Ice core records of continental, hemispheric and global variability and change
- #4574: State Estimate of East Antarctic Ice Shelves
- #4414: IPICS 2k ice core array: Filling the climatological gap of the Indian Ocean sector from Wilhelm II Land