Katie Lowery

CR Cryospheric Sciences

The 2025 Outstanding Student and PhD candidate Presentation (OSPP) Award is awarded to Katie Lowery for the poster/PICO entitled:

Drivers of Ice Shelf Basal Melt on Pine Island Glacier: Ocean vs Geometry? (Lowery, K.; Dutrieux, P.; Holland, P.; Hogg, A.; Gourmelen, N.)

Click here to download the poster/PICO file.

Katie Lowery is a PhD Student at the British Antarctic Survey and The University of Leeds, affiliated with the Polar Oceans team and the Satellite Ice Dynamics group, respectively. Under the supervision of Dr. Pierre Dutrieux, Prof. Paul Holland, Prof. Anna Hogg and Prof. Noel Gourmelen, Katie is working on ice shelf-ocean interactions using both satellite data and ocean models.

At EGU 2025, Katie presented a poster on the relative importance of ocean conditions and geometric changes on Pine Island Glacier ice shelf melt rates. She used the MITgcm ocean model bounded by CryoSat-2 ice shelf geometries and ocean mooring data to assess these factors. Her and her team concluded that between 2011 and 2021, ocean conditions largely controlled the temporal variability of melt rates and ice shelf buttressing capacity. In contrast, the spatial distribution of melt was controlled by the ice shelf geometry.