Research

My work develops UAV-borne ground-penetrating radar (GPR) and combines it with AI to quantify how climate change is reshaping the alpine cryosphere – from snowpack structure to glacier ice thickness.

Ongoing Projects

MELT.AI logo

PhD Project · Apr 2025 – Mar 2028

MELT.AI

Glacier ice-thickness mapping with UAV-borne GPR and AI. MELT.AI delivers, for the first time, area-wide high-resolution measurements of glacier ice thickness and subglacial topography – thousands of precise points per glacier instead of sparse ground- or helicopter-based profiles. AI methods for data fusion and pattern recognition link ice-thickness and mass-balance data, enabling reconstruction and projection of glacier states.

GPR surface and bed picking experiment

Subproject of MELT.AI · Citizen science

GPR Picking Experiment

A short, interactive in-browser experiment in which participants pick the ice surface and bed in real UAV-GPR radargrams. It measures how consistently these reflections are identified by hand – a human benchmark for the automated picking developed in MELT.AI. (~15 minutes)

Take part →

Past Projects

STRATIFY – airborne GPR snowpack survey

Master's Project · Oct 2022 – Apr 2024

STRATIFY

Evaluation of an airborne GPR method to investigate snowpack properties. STRATIFY (FFG-funded) laid the methodological groundwork for MELT.AI, establishing UAV-GPR workflows for retrieving snow depth and internal snowpack stratigraphy across alpine terrain.

CADS – camera avalanche detection

Applied Research · Nov 2021 – May 2023

CADS – Camera Avalanche Detection System

Automatic detection of fresh avalanches from terrestrial webcam images using computer-vision AI, enabling real-time avalanche monitoring from existing camera infrastructure.