Susan L. Howard

Susan is a Staff Scientist at Earth and Space Research where studies polar oceanography and glaciology, focusing on ocean, sea ice, and ice shelf interactions, as well as tides in the polar regions. She is currently using ICESat-2, along with satellite imagery, to improve understanding of interactions between the ocean, ice shelves, mobile pack ice, landfast sea ice and icebergs on Antarctica’s continental shelf. She has extensive experience in algorithm development, numerical modeling, and analysis of large data sets.

She has been involved in fieldwork in the Antarctic as part the Southern Ocean GLOBEC (2001) and ROSETTA-Ice (2017) projects. 

From 2008 – 2012, she had a brief absence from ESR and oceanography when she moved to New Zealand and worked as a physical simulation developer in the Visual FX industry.  She worked on Avatar, Rise of the Planet of the Apes, The Adventures of Tintin, and the Hobbit.  Although a great experience, she happily returned to ESR and Seattle in 2012 to continue her work in the polar oceans.

Susan is also involved in a variety of educational outreach opportunities and enjoys sparking kids’ interest in the ocean.  She has developed the popular Density and the Oceans STEM exhibit as well as a series of talks on atmospheric and ocean circulation patterns and climate for middle school students. She also co-taught the Lakeside summer research institute, which gave high school students the opportunity to participate in self-guided research in the geosciences (see https://www.esr.org/lakeside-summer-research-institute/ ).  She continues to look for new ways to be involved in STEM outreach.

Current Research Projects:

• Antarctic Tide Gauge Database
• Polar Tides Models
• ICESat-2 Science Team: Observing and quantifying interactions between sea ice, ice shelves, icebergs and the ocean around Antarctica using ICESat‐2 altimetry
  
• SWOT Science Team:  Where sea ice, ocean, and ice shelf meet: ice-ocean co-evolution along the Antarctic Amundsen Sea coast from SWOT using open cloud infrastructure

Education:

Susan Howard’s curriculum vitae

Publications

For more information, see Susan Howard on Google Scholar

PUBLISHED

Datasets & Code

Mike Hart-Davis, Susan L. Howard, Richard Ray, Ole Andersen, Laurie Padman, Frank Nilsen, & Denise Dettmering. (2023). Arctic Tidal Constituent Atlas (ArcTiCA) : A database of tide elevation constituents for the Arctic region from 1800 through present day. Arctic Data Center. doi:10.18739/A2VT1GR64.

Howard, S. L., Little, C., Padman, L., & Sun, Q. (2022) “Gridded Values of Conservative Temperature and Absolute Salinity Around Antarctica averaged for the depth range 300 m to min([water depth, 1000]) m” U.S. Antarctic Program (USAP) Data Center. doi: https://doi.org/10.15784/601516.

Laurie Padman, Svetlana Erofeeva, and Susan L. Howard. 2022. Tide Model Driver (TMD) version 2.5, Toolbox for MATLAB (MATrix LABoratory). Arctic Data Center. doi:10.18739/A21Z41V08

Howard, S.L. & M. K. Becker (2021). Code for Ice-Front and Rampart-Moat Detection and Quantification in ICESat-2 Laser Altimetry (v1.0.0). Zenodo. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.4697517

Howard, S. L., & L. Padman (2021). Gr1kmTM: Greenland 1 kilometer Tide Model, 2021. Arctic Data Center. doi:10.18739/A2251FM3S.

Howard, S. L., & L. Padman (2021). Arc2kmTM: Arctic 2 kilometer Tide Model, 2021. Arctic Data Center. doi:10.18739/A2PV6B79W.

Howard, S. L., L. Padman, M. King (2020). Antarctic Tide Gauge Database, version 1. U.S. Antarctic Program (USAP) Data Center. https://doi.org/10.15784/601358

Padman, L., S. Erofeeva, and S. Howard (2020). AODTM5: Arctic Ocean Dynamics-based Tide Model, on 5 kilometer grid, developed in 2004. Arctic Data Center. doi:10.18739/A2901ZG3N

Padman, L., S. Erofeeva, and S. Howard (2020). AOTIM5: Arctic Ocean Inverse Tide Model, on 5 kilometer grid, developed in 2004. Arctic Data Center. doi:10.18739/A2S17SS80

Springer, S., S. L. Howard, & L. Padman (2020) “Ross Sea ocean model simulation used to support ROSETTA-Ice ” U.S. Antarctic Program (USAP) Data Center. https://doi.org/10.15784/601255.

Howard, S. L., L. Padman, S. Erofeeva (2019). CATS2008: Circum-Antarctic Tidal Simulation version 2008. U.S. Antarctic Program (USAP) Data Center. https://doi.org/10.15784/601235

Howard, S. L. and L. Padman (2004), “Hourly ADCP data from ARSV Laurence M. Gould and RVIB Nathaniel B. Palmer cruises to the Southern Ocean from 2001-2003 as part of the Southern Ocean GLOBEC project.”, 2019-02-22, DOI:10.1575/1912/bco-dmo.2343.1, https://hdl.handle.net/1912/23718

GitHub Repositories

• https://github.com/EarthAndSpaceResearch/TMD_Matlab_Toolbox_v2.5
• https://github.com/EarthAndSpaceResearch/Becker_etal_2021_GRL_code
• https://github.com/EarthAndSpaceResearch/AntTG_Database_Tools