Robbie Mallett

Some eye-opening work out by my erstwhile colleague Amy Macfarlane today in Elementa, looking at the environmental impact of the MOSAiC expedition.

online.ucpress.edu/elementa/art...

Yevgeny Fedorov crewed the NP1 drifting station for 274 days at the start of the Soviet programme. He crewed several others afterwards.

Whether the Russians were paying respect & homage to the spirit of MOSAiC, or saying "we did it first & it isn't new" is unclear to me. Maybe we'll never know.

Something that I did not hear discussed at the time (and have not heard since) is the symbolism of the Russians sending their icebreaker RV Akademik Federov to assist RV Polarstern at the start of the 2019/20 MOSAiC sea ice drift campaign.

They had newer & more powerful ships, so why pick Federov?

What would Thomas Kuhn think about me? — Robbie Mallett Alternative titles included “WWTKD” and “Am I precipitating a crisis?” The March edition of Nature featured an interesting perspective by Tiffany Shaw and Bjorn Stevens entitled “ The other climate ...

New blog post: "What would Thomas Kuhn think about me?"

In it I consider incremental science, paradigm shifts, CryoSat-2 radar waves, and me.

www.robbiemallett.com/researchblog...

While the annual minimum extent is flattening, the annual maximum extent is still declining pretty linearly...

Up close and personal with one of the Arctic's infamous boundary layer inversions!

Updating a figure with 2025 data for a research proposal. The shift in conditions around 2016 are becoming starker by the year...

As my PhD came to a close in 2022 I was lucky to join an icebreaker campaign in the Weddell Sea.

TLDR: lots of very hard, very coarse snow.

Rosie Willatt then led a very nice analysis of the radar data we collected, and it's out today in GRL.

agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1029/...

@carmenjulianab.bsky.social

Curious if there was discussion about the number of significant figures on the 1.36C figure given preindustrial uncertainty?

My (potentially naive!) understanding was that we can't be more precise than the baseline?

Grim.

do you have a link to this announcement?

This is a cool video!

Strange to use a photo of an ESTRACK station to represent "radar" though...

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cebrero...

Representation of Arctic Winter Atmospheric Boundary Layer Stability Over Sea Ice in CMIP6 Models A cloudy state, without strong low-level stability (LLS), is often observed over winter Arctic sea ice but is absent in most Coupled Model Intercomparison Project (CMIP6) models CMIP6 models show...

Paper out today led by @aliduffey.bsky.social where we compare the atmospheric boundary layer in climate models to 7000 vertical profiles from Soviet ice stations + ~500 from the MOSAiC & SHEBA campaigns.

More forays into the world of polar meteorology to come!

dx.doi.org/10.1029/2024...

Fun to speak to the Blue Compass conference in Tromsø today about Arctic sea ice decline: it's strongly confined to shallow waters and exclusive economic zones, posing an immediate governance challenge.

"snow brine" research is busy right now, and I'm lucky to be part of a few different strands:

Amy Macfarlane working on micro-CT & ion ratio observations from MOSAiC, Rosie Willatt has cool experimental data from UCL cold lab, and snow-ice modelling results from Connor Nelson at UCL looking great!

Some new work out today on salt movement in snow covered sea ice, led by Anton Komarov at U Manitoba.

Anton ran with the lab approach I used with Vishnu Nandan, but eliminated some of methodological uncertainties to produce much more compelling results.

www.cambridge.org/core/journal...

The trouble is, it's a good strategy at the individual level, but holds back everyone in the aggregate. Prisoners' dilemma.

Totally agree that this is a big problem.

ECRs are constantly advised to develop something only they can then offer (a model, a data product, a lab method) and then leverage it to get grant money.

already in an early career catastrophe research role but thanks

‘A diagnosis can sweep away guilt’: the delicate art of treating ADHD The long read: For children with ADHD, getting the help they need depends on being correctly diagnosed. As a doctor, I have seen how tricky and frustrating a process that can be

My cofinalist is @jackgoulder.bsky.social, a doctor working for the NHS.

You can read his fantastic and thoughtful Guardian essay on treating ADHD here:

www.theguardian.com/society/arti...

Really happy to be one of two finalists for "Best popular article written by a scientist" this year at the ABSW awards.

Particularly poignant to be considered for the Katharine Giles Award. I never met Katharine, but I was often steered by her legacy while working for @cpom-uk.bsky.social

Don't care about the Arctic because it's empty and distant - care because it's busy and close An Arctic resident's view of the row about Camilla Hempleman-Adams' trek across Baffin Island

Wrote about the myth of an empty, distant Arctic for @geographical.co.uk

geographical.co.uk/news/the-arc...

The ICARP IV Summit — Robbie Mallett The Arctic science community undergoes a planning exercise every ten years. This process is known as the International Conference on Arctic Research Planning (ICARP), and we’re currently on its fourth...

Another blog post, this time about the recent ICARP IV Summit in Boulder, CO.

I've written about the townhall meeting that I helped run with other co-chairs of Research Priority Team 2.

www.robbiemallett.com/researchblog...

A SCAR fellowship adventure — Robbie Mallett I was received a fellowship award from the Scientific Committee on Antarctic Research (SCAR). The unlike its sister fellowship from IASC (which I’ve also written about, and more on that soon), the SCA...

New blog post about my SCAR Fellowship experiment at the Churchill Marine Observatory.

Oxygen isotope data now back from the lab, and all looking good!

www.robbiemallett.com/researchblog...

I had to do this recently, but with "3 most important papers".

I was unnerved by it - felt that being a team player & collaborator was subordinated to seizing lead-authorships in high impact journals.

If we picked football teams like this we'd have all strikers and no goalies.

Lots of questions indeed. But I completely assumed those upward jumps in radar freeboard were either purely a result of

a) shifting radar penetration from dry snow to wet snow

b) reduction in snow loading

Turns out there's an option c!

Thirty years later (2022 vs 1992) I was in the same basket, in the same Weddell Sea, also looking at pancake ice.

The more things change...

Extremely interesting! I detected some of these jumps during my PhD (blue line), but never linked them to decreases in ice density.

Two reasons I published this in a journal rather than on my blog:

1) I extend the function outside of winter months to Sep, May & June

2) I add a RMSE/uncertainty value to the fit. This is important for propagating into altimetry-based sea ice thickness products, and has hitherto been lacking.