Jan De Rydt

Jan De Rydt is a UKRI Future Leaders Fellow at Northumbria University, where he conducts research in polar glaciology and oceanography. He is interested in physical processes that govern the dynamics of glaciers and ice caps, and their interactions with the climate system. He uses a combination of theory, measurements and numerical models to simulate present-day and future changes of the Antarctic and Greenland ice sheets, and understand their complex intereactions with the surrounding ocean. His work aims to enable more robust forecasts of sea level rise over the next decades to centuries, and advance our understanding of the interactions between ice sheets and the global climate system.

Research group

> Dr Brad Reed, May 2023-present. Brad is working on coupled ice-ocean modelling of the Amundsen Sea in West Antarctica.

> Dr Jo Zanker, August 2023-present. Jo is using numerical simulations to assess the importance of Greenland's remaining ice shelves for the future dynamics of the Ice Sheet.

> Dr Qing Qin, October 2023-present. Qing is working on hindcast and forecast simulations of the Antarctic Ice Sheet and the quantification of future freshwater fluxes into the Southern Ocean.

> Dr Sam Hartharn-Evans, May 2025-present. Sam is working on small-scale processes at the ice-ocean interface using numerical models and lab experiments.

Biography

Jan De Rydt is involved with several research projects, funded by the European Comission and UK Research and Innovation.

• His UKRI Future Leaders Fellowship (2022-2026) aims to address three outstanding challenges in ice flow modelling to enable the first robust uncertainty quantification of Antarctic ice loss for a range of climate scenarios between present-day and 2300. The first challenge is the initial value problem of predicting the evolution of the ice sheet given an uncertain estimate of its present-day state. The second challenge is the structural problem of unknown or uncertain physical parameters. Here the focus is on improving the misfit between modelled and observed estimates of Antarctic mass loss between 1990 and 2020. The third challenge is the boundary value problem of assessing future changes in the state of the Ice Sheet due to uncertain external forcing. The project will produce ensemble forecasts and a stochastic error quantification of Antarctic mass loss between 2020 and 2300.
• OCEAN:ICE (EU Horizon Europe, 2022-2026) assesses the impacts of key Antarctic Ice Sheet and Southern Ocean processes on Planet Earth, via their influence on sea level rise, deep water formation, ocean circulation and climate. Using the ice sheet model Úa and coupled ice-ocean model Úa-MITgcm, the project will quantify AIS melt sensitivity to climate forcing with the aim to reduce the ‘deep uncertainty’ in freshwater flux and sea level rise projections to 2300. Jan leads Work Package 4, which will contribute to projections of basal meltwater, iceberg calving and surface runoff from the Antarctic Ice Sheet for a range of future climate scenarios.
• Jan is a co-I on the PRECISE project (2023-2029), funded by the Danish Novo Nordisk Foundation. PRECISE will develop and improve models for how the ice sheets contribute to rising sea levels. The project will develop deep learning tools to emulate ocean dynamics, thereby reducing the computational cost of expensive coupled ice-ocean simulations whilst capturing key interactions between ice-sheet and ocean dynamics.