University of California, Irvine National Aeronautics and Space Administration
Isabella Velicogna is a geoscientist known for her work using gravity measurements from space to study changes in the polar ice sheets and water storage on Earth.
Velicogna was one of the contributing authors to "Observations: Cryosphere" in the 2013 report from the
Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (
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help)).[2] In 2020, she was elected a fellow of the
American Geophysical Union who cited her "for groundbreaking research to document and explain the evolution of ice sheets and groundwater resources using gravity
remote sensing technologies."
Research
Velicogna developed the use of time series analysis of gravity data from the Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment
(GRACE) satellite to track changes in polar ice sheets and in 2006 she used this metric to quantify the loss of ice in Antarctic.[3][4] By 2009, her data revealed the rate of ice loss is increasing in both
Greenland and
Antarctica[5] with large losses of ice in Greenland during the 2019 season.[6][7] Velicogna and her colleagues use data from the GRACE satellite to track
sea level rise[8] which allows global estimates of changes in sea level.[9] Velicogna has also applied time series of gravity data to changes in groundwater storage in different geographic locales including India,[10] Texas,[11] and the Canadian Arctic.[12]