My name is Will Harcourt and I am an Independent Research Fellow at the University of Aberdeen. The research of our group focuses on understanding the cryosphere using Earth Observation (EO) and Artificial Intelligence (AI) techniques. Geographically, we primarily work in the Arctic in locations such as Svalbard and Greenland. We welcome anyone who is interested in our research topics to get in touch, we’ll be more than happy to discuss potential synergies and research opportunities. For prospective undergraduate / postgraduate taught students interested in undertaking dissertations with us, please get in touch and we can discuss potential ideas. We’ll also be more than happy to discuss possibilities of internships, developing a PhD project and postdoctoral research with us (e.g. PDRAs, fellowships). We are also happy to host PhD students and more senior academics to initiate new collaborations.
This website provides details of our groups activities. Please don’t hesitate to get in touch if you want to find out more.
Our photo gallery can be found here: https://williamharcourt.co.uk/gallery/
Details of our outreach activities can be found here: https://williamharcourt.co.uk/outreach/
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New Paper in Geophysical Research Letters!
We report a new paper in Geophysical Research Letters entitled “94 GHz radar backscatter characteristics of alpine glacier ice”. In this paper, we characterise for the first time the radar backscatter characteristics of glacier ice at 94 GHz. This radar frequency has seldom been used for glacier mapping and monitoring but has the potential to… Read more
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Will Harcourt presents at the University of Aberdeen Interdisciplinary Challenges Open day!
Will Harcourt presented plans for his upcoming 5-year interdisciplinary fellowship at the University of Aberdeen. This was part of a day of activities at the university kick-starting the interdisciplinary initiative as part of the Aberdeen 2040 vision for research and teaching. The new project will be a part of the Data/AI Challenge Theme and will… Read more
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Welcome to new team members!
A warm welcome to 2 new members of the team! Jacob Seston has just started a PhD looking at developing sea ice forecasting methodologies using deep learning. Steven Wallace will be developing multi-modal machine learning algorithms applied to remote sensing data in the cryosphere. Welcome to both! Read more
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Day 3 of Borebreen Fieldwork
Day 3 ended up being very similar as day 2 – lots of walking around finding suitable locations to deploy seismometers! It’s critical that we get these out as early as possible. These instruments will be able to measure ‘event’s as the bed of the glacier. When I say event, I mean signals that result… Read more
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Fieldwork Day 2
A bit behind on the posts, but day 2 of fieldwork at Borebreen went well. After a successful first day scoping out the field site, we started deploying seismometers on the ice surface. Pretty tricky at first as the surface of Borebreen was heavily crevassed. We expected this though – the glacier is surging, which… Read more
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Fieldwork Blog Day 1!
A team of us are currently on a Polar expedition to Svalbard, a Norwegian archipelago in the high Arctic. We are studying Borebreen which is a tidewater glacier around 40 km from the main settlement, Longyearbyen. Borebreen is a surge-type glacier which means it undergoes periods of fast and slow flow in a cyclical manner.… Read more
Research Page: William D. Harcourt 