Penny How

Data scientist based in Greenland and Denmark, interested in glacier dynamics, photogrammetry and programming.

blog

Greenland Science Week 2023

At the beginning of November, we had Greenland Science Week which is a conference held across Greenland every two years to present and disseminate research t...

pypromice available through conda

October has been a chaotic month with many parts of my job converging. Firstly, we reached a big milestone with pypromice, the Python package for all our aut...

NUK station fieldwork, software paper accepted and restarting dormant projects

Let's try and document my work again, now with a fresh start back to work after some leave. The month started straight into fieldwork, with scheduled weather...

GC-Net and PROMICE weather station 2022 fieldtrip to NE Greenland

In May 2022, a team went to NE Greenland to install new automatic weather stations (AWS) and perform AWS maintanence at four existing sites. Two of these are...

Investigating Greenland’s ice marginal lakes under a changing climate (GrIML)

I have recently started a new 2-year project on ice-marginal lakes in Greenland, as a follow on to previous work where we derived an ice-marginal lake invent...

Introducing Schengulator

Schengulator is a tool to calculate how many days an individual has been in Schengen countries out of a specified 180-day period. The Schengen Visa Rule ...

Making Readthedocs for a Python package

A readthedocs page is handy when you wish to auto-generate online documentation for a package, such as in package releases or submitting code for peer review...

Greenland-wide inventory of ice marginal lakes published in Scientific Reports

This month we published findings from our work on Greenland's ice marginal lakes. This work are part of the ESA Glaciers CCI (Climate Change Initiative), fo...

Six months working in Greenland

Since starting work in Greenland, we have had a handful of interesting projects which started before I arrived . Thankfully these projects have been related ...

PyTrx published in Frontiers in Earth Science

Frontiers in Earth Science recently published our work on PyTrx, the Python toolset developed during my PhD for processing oblique time-lapse imagery of glac...

Making a PyPI package

Recently, I have had a paper accepted which presents PyTrx, a new Python toolset for use in glacial photogrammetry. Over the course of getting this published...

Moving to Greenland

It's been a while since I used this platform to post an update. A lot has changed in the past year. For one, I now live in Nuuk, the capital city of Greenlan...

Calving dynamics at Tunabreen, Svalbard, published in Annals of Glaciology

Annals of Glaciology has recently published our work examining calving dynamics at a tidewater glacier in Svalbard (click here to see article). In the study,...

A dummies guide to… my PhD thesis on glacier dynamics

Recently my PhD thesis was made available online through the Edinburgh Research Archive, titled 'Dynamical change at tidewater glaciers examined using time-l...

Subglacial hydrology at Kronebreen, Svalbard, published in The Cryosphere

The Cryosphere recently published our work on Kronebreen, a fast-flowing tidewater glacier in Svalbard (click here to see the article). The study examines su...

Ptarmigans love time-lapse cameras

We have been setting up time-lapse cameras in Kongsfjorden, Svalbard since 2014 to observe glacier change over time. Ptarmigans have been known to nest by t...

What is going on at Tunabreen?

Tunabreen is a tidewater glacier in Svalbard that has recently been displaying some exciting activity. It is known as a surge-type glacier, with discrete per...

Using meltwater plumes to infer subglacial hydrology at tidewater glaciers

PhD update: January 2017. Meltwater plumes are the upwelling of fresh water in front of a tidewater glacier. These are known to influence submarine melt rate...

PhD new year resolutions 2017

At the beginning of 2016, I set myself five new year resolutions specifically relating to my PhD work. Now it is the end of the year, I thought I would revie...

How time-lapse photography works in the study of glacial processes

Whilst preparing a talk for the Geography research seminar series at the University of Manchester, I decided to include some information on time-lapse method...

The Snow Tourist by Charlie English (Book Review)

I didn't know what to expect when I picked up a popular science book about snow, especially when its tagline is 'A search for the world's purest, deepest sno...

PhD Update: October 2016

It is known that supraglacial lakes on the surface of a glacier fill and drain over the course of a summer melt season. Lake observations from time-lapse pho...

Photography and Snowflakes

It is generally believed that no snowflake is the same because of one man and his obsession with looking at snow crystals: Wilson Bentley. Over the course of...

PhD Update: September 2016

I have been in Svalbard (again) for most of September, collecting images from our 14 time-lapse cameras that we have based in Kongsfjorden and Tempelfjorden....

A detailed look at the front of Kronebreen, Svalbard

Thanks to some nice boat trips this September (and a good zoom lens on my camera*), we were able to take a detailed look at the calving front of Kronebreen, ...

PhD Update: August 2016

The month started with troubleshooting ongoing uncertainties with projection of measurements from the two-dimensional image coordinates to real-world positio...

The Expedition: Solving the Mystery of a Polar Tragedy by Bea Uusma - Book Review

Normally the last thing I want to do after a hard day’s work focused on a polar subject is… read yet more polar-related stuff. There are multiple books gathe...

PhD Update: July 2016

The majority of July has been focused on widening the applications of the Area class in PyTrx, which is being developed to determine real world areal data fr...

PhD update: June 2016

I have spent this month focused on developing PyTrx, our analysis software for oblique time-lapse image sequences. In particular, I have been working on a se...

A PhD student’s views on the EU referendum

Last week the UK decided to leave the EU. Like many others (16,141,241 people to be exact), I voted to remain in the EU. One of the main reasons I personally...

PhD update: May 2016

May has been a varied month beginning with returning from Svalbard. The fieldwork in Kongsfjorden was very successful, with 12 time-lapse cameras deployed at...

Why study Kronebreen and other small glaciers?

There are two motivations behind writing this blog post. One is to document the deployment of our time-lapse cameras for a third consecutive summer season at...

PhD update: April 2016

This month has been a mixed bag, beginning and finishing in Svalbard with brief visits to Edinburgh and Vienna in between. It's been a very intense month of ...

EGU 2016

The European Geosciences Union (EGU) General Assembly is held every year to bring together geoscientists to present and discuss their work. I went along to h...

Inside our cameras

Sometimes we get requests concerning what equipment we use in our time-lapse camera systems. Our systems are not off-the-shelf products, we buy specific part...

PhD update: March 2016

This month I was meant to go back to Edinburgh... but I didn't! Instead I stayed on to help with some radar surveying fieldwork after the end of the glaciolo...

Key time-lapse studies into glacier dynamics

Two of our stereo time-lapse cameras (cameras 8a and 8b) at Kronebreen glacier (Svalbard), which were installed as part of the CRIOS (Calving Rates and Impa...

Svalbard photography (Feb-Mar 2016)

For the past month I have been in Svalbard, demonstrating on the Glaciology course (AG-325/825) at the University Centre in Svalbard (UNIS). The course is ai...

Paulabreen

This month I have been in Svalbard, demonstrating on the Glaciology course (AG-325/825) at the University Centre in Svalbard (UNIS). The course is aimed at M...

PhD update: February 2016

PhD update: this month I have been in Svalbard, demonstrating on the Glaciology course (AG-325/825) at the University Centre in Svalbard (UNIS). The course i...

PhD update: January 2016

PhD update: further work on calving behaviour, what's next for this work, and beginning a month in Svalbard This month I continued with the work concerning ...

Confessions of a glaciology PhD student

Amusing excerpts from the diary of second-year glaciology PhD student I have come to the end of the second year of my PhD this January. It's been a great ye...

PhD update: December 2015

Examining calving behaviours at two glaciers in Svalbard Kronebreen and Tunabreen are two tidewater glaciers in Svalbard that exhibit very different calving ...

PhD update: November 2015

Bed water pressures correspond to surface lake drainage events at Kronebreen November has well and truly been office-based apart from a trip to Aberdeen for...

PhD update: October 2015

Returning from Svalbard and installing time-lapse cameras in Iceland This month has been varied. I started the beginning of October with my last couple of d...

PhD update: September 2015

Retrieving time-lapse cameras from Kronebreen glacier, and teaching at the University Centre in Svalbard (UNIS) Post-doc researcher Sarah Thompson (UNIS) t...

Tunabreen

Tunabreen (August 2015) Tunabreen is an ocean-terminating glacier on the west coast of Svalbard, which is special due to its unique set of dynamics. A high...

Fieldwork & Film

The Fieldwork Last year, we placed seven time-lapse cameras at the margins of Kronebreen from May to September 2014, capturing images every 30 minutes. These...