Tom Jordan

Tom Jordan
Plymouth Marine Laboratory | PML

PhD

About

55
Publications
15,579
Reads
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1,920
Citations
Introduction
I am an Optical and Earth Observation Scientist currently working on remote sensing of water colour and quality. As a postdoc and research fellow, I worked on radar remote sensing of glaciers. This included applications focused on subglacial hydrology, ice-sheet topography, and ice microstructure. As a PhD student, I worked on optical characterization of reflective structures in marine animals.
Additional affiliations
October 2020 - present
Plymouth Marine Laboratory
Position
  • Researcher
August 2017 - August 2020
University of Bristol
Position
  • Fellow
Description
  • Radar Geophysics
August 2017 - August 2019
Stanford University
Position
  • PostDoc Position
Description
  • Radar Geophysics
Education
January 2011 - July 2014
University of Bristol
Field of study
  • Applied Optics
September 2009 - December 2010
University of Bristol
Field of study
  • Complexity Sciences
September 2007 - September 2008
University of Reading
Field of study
  • Meteorology and Applied Mathematics

Publications

Publications (55)
Article
Full-text available
Dielectric multilayer reflectors that are non-polarizing are an important class of optical device and have numerous applications within optical fibres [1], dielectric waveguides [2] and LEDs [3]. Here we report analyses of a biological non-polarizing optical mechanism found in the broadband guanine-cytoplasm "silver" multilayer reflectors of three...
Article
Full-text available
Subglacial roughness can be determined at a variety of length scales from radio-echo sounding (RES) data either via statistical analysis of topography or inferred from basal radar scattering. Past studies have demonstrated that subglacial terrain exhibits self-affine (power law) roughness scaling behaviour, but existing radar scattering models do n...
Article
Full-text available
There is widespread, but often indirect, evidence that a significant fraction of the bed beneath the Greenland Ice Sheet is thawed (at or above the pressure melting point for ice). This includes the beds of major outlet glaciers and their tributaries and a large area around the NorthGRIP borehole in the ice-sheet interior. The ice-sheet-scale distr...
Article
Full-text available
We use polarimetric radar sounding to investigate ice crystal orientation fabric and its impact on ice viscosity within the near surface of Rutford Ice Stream, West Antarctica. The technique retrieves lateral and depth variations in the horizontal components of ice fabric but no direct information on the vertical fabric component. In the shallowest...
Article
Full-text available
Validation of satellite-derived aquatic reflectance involves relating meter-scale in situ observations to satellite pixels with typical spatial resolution~10-100 m within a temporal "match-up window" of an overpass. Due to sub-pixel variation these discrepancies in measurement scale are a source of uncertainty in the validation result. Additionally...
Preprint
Full-text available
In situ measurements of particulate inherent optical properties (IOPs) – absorption (ap(λ)), scattering (bp(λ)), and beam attenuation (cp(λ)) – are crucial for development of optical algorithms that retrieve biogeochemical quantities such as Chlorophyll a, particulate organic carbon (POC) and total suspended matter (TSM). Here we present a compilat...
Article
Full-text available
The development of algorithms for remote sensing of water quality (RSWQ) requires a large amount of in situ data to account for the bio-geo-optical diversity of inland and coastal waters. The GLObal Reflectance community dataset for Imaging and optical sensing of Aquatic environments (GLORIA) includes 7,572 curated hyperspectral remote sensing refl...
Article
Full-text available
In situ hyperspectral remote-sensing reflectance (Rrs(λ)) is used to derive water quality products and perform autonomous monitoring of aquatic ecosystems. Conventionally, above-water Rrs(λ) is estimated from three spectroradiometers which measure downwelling planar irradiance (Ed(λ)), sky radiance (Ls(λ)), and total upwelling radiance (Lt(λ)), wit...
Article
Full-text available
Plain Language Summary Pine Island Glacier (PIG) and Thwaites Glacier (TG) are the fastest‐changing outlet glaciers in West Antarctica. To understand how these glaciers move and evolve in the future, we need to understand processes that occur at the ice‐bed interface that control glacial motion. Here, we investigate the basal conditions of PIG and...
Article
Full-text available
In airborne radargrams, undulating periodic patterns in amplitude that overprint traditional radiostratigraphic layering are occasionally observed, however, they have yet to be analyzed from a geophysical or glaciological perspective. We present evidence supported by theory that these depth‐periodic patterns are consistent with a modulation of the...
Article
Full-text available
Radar-sounding surveys associated with the discovery of a large impact crater beneath Hiawatha Glacier, Greenland, revealed bright, flat subglacial reflections hypothesized to originate from a subglacial groundwater table. We test this hypothesis using radiometric and hydrologic analysis of those radar data. The dielectric loss between the reflecti...
Article
Full-text available
We report on analysis of englacial radio-frequency (RF) pulser data received over horizontal baselines of 1–5 km, based on broadcasts from two sets of transmitters deployed to depths of up to 1500 meters at the South Pole. First, we analyze data collected using two RF bicone transmitters 1400 meters below the ice surface, and frozen into boreholes...
Article
Full-text available
Englacial layer velocity can provide insights on the vertical-velocity structure of the ice sheets. We present a repeat-pass interferometric approach that allows the estimation of the vertical englacial layer velocity using the radar sounder data. In contrast to the ground-based sensors, the airborne radar sounder data can potentially be used to es...
Article
Full-text available
The Askaryan Radio Array (ARA) experiment at the South Pole is designed to detect high-energy neutrinos which, via in-ice interactions, produce coherent radiation at frequencies up to 1000 MHz. Characterization of ice birefringence, and its effect upon wave polarization, is proposed to enable range estimation to a neutrino interaction and hence aid...
Article
Full-text available
The Askaryan Radio Array (ARA) experiment at the South Pole is designed to detect high-energy neutrinos which, via in-ice interactions, produce coherent radiation at frequencies up to 1000 MHz. Characterization of ice birefringence, and its effect upon wave polarization, is proposed to enable range estimation to a neutrino interaction and hence aid...
Article
Full-text available
Here we use polarimetric measurements from an Autonomous phase-sensitive Radio-Echo Sounder (ApRES) to investigate ice fabric within Whillans Ice Stream, West Antarctica. The survey traverse is bounded at one end by the suture zone with the Mercer Ice Stream and at the other end by a basal ‘sticky spot’. Our data analysis employs a phase-based pola...
Article
Radar sounding is a geophysical method capable of directly imaging subsurface interfaces within the ice shell of the icy moons, including Jupiter’s moon, Europa. For this reason, both the European Space Agency’s JUpiter ICy moons Explorer and the National Aeronautics and Space Administration’s Europa Clipper missions have ice penetrating radar soun...
Article
Full-text available
The subglacial environment of the Greenland Ice Sheet (GrIS) is poorly constrained both in its bulk properties, for example geology, the presence of sediment, and the presence of water, and interfacial conditions, such as roughness and bed rheology. There is, therefore, limited understanding of how spatially heterogeneous subglacial properties rela...
Preprint
The Askaryan Radio Array (ARA) experiment at the South Pole is designed to detect high-energy neutrinos which, via in-ice interactions, produce coherent radiation at frequencies up to 1000 MHz. In Dec. 2018, a custom high-amplitude radio-frequency transmitter was lowered into the 1700 m SPICE ice core to provide test sources for ARA receiver statio...
Article
Ice crystal orientation fabric (COF) records information about past ice-sheet deformation and influences the present-day flow of ice. Polarimetric radar sounding provides a means to infer anisotropic COF patterns due to the associated birefringence of polar ice. Here, we develop a polarimetric coherence (phase-based) method to determine horizontal...
Article
Full-text available
The subglacial environment of the Greenland Ice Sheet (GrIS) is poorly constrained, both in its bulk properties, for example geology, presence of sediment, and of water, and interfacial conditions, such as roughness and bed rheology. There is, therefore, limited understanding of how spatially heterogeneous subglacial properties relate to ice-sheet...
Article
Full-text available
Radar‐sounding surveys measuring ice thickness in Greenland have enabled an increasingly “complete” knowledge of basal topography and glaciological processes. Where such observations are spatially limited, bed elevation has been interpolated through mass conservation or kriging. Ordinary kriging fails to resolve anisotropy in bed geometry, however,...
Article
Full-text available
Satellite imagery reveals flowstripes on Foundation Ice Stream parallel to ice flow, and meandering features on the ice-shelf that cross-cut ice flow and are thought to be formed by water exiting a well-organised subglacial system. Here, ice-penetrating radar data show flow-parallel hard-bed landforms beneath the grounded ice, and channels incised...
Article
Curie depths beneath Greenland are revealed by spectral analysis of data from the World Digital Magnetic Anomaly Map 2. A thermal model of the lithosphere then provides a corresponding geothermal heat flux map. This new map exhibits significantly higher frequency but lower amplitude variation than earlier heat flux maps and provides an important bo...
Article
Full-text available
There is widespread, but often indirect, evidence that a significant fraction of the bed beneath the Greenland Ice Sheet is thawed (at or above the pressure melting point for ice). This includes the beds of major outlet glaciers and their tributaries and a large area around the NorthGRIP borehole in the ice-sheet interior. The ice-sheet scale distr...
Article
Full-text available
Greenland's bed topography is a primary control on ice flow, grounding line migration, calving dynamics, and subglacial drainage. Moreover, fjord bathymetry regulates the penetration of warm Atlantic water (AW) that rapidly melts and undercuts Greenland's marine-terminating glaciers. Here we present a new compilation of Greenland bed topography tha...
Article
Full-text available
Many animals use structural coloration to create bright and conspicuous visual signals. Selection of the size and shape of the optical structures animals use defines both the colour and intensity of the light reflected. The material used to create these reflectors is also important; however, animals are restricted to a limited number of materials:...
Article
Full-text available
Bed topography is a critical boundary for the numerical modelling of ice sheets and ice–ocean interactions. A persistent issue with existing topography products for the bed of the Greenland Ice Sheet and surrounding sea floor is the poor representation of coastal bathymetry, especially in regions of floating ice and near the grounding line. Sparse...
Article
Full-text available
Bed topography is a critical boundary for the numerical modelling of ice sheets and ice-ocean interactions. A persistent issue with existing topography products for the bed of the Greenland Ice Sheet and surrounding sea floor is the poor representation of coastal bathymetry, especially in regions of floating ice and near the grounding line. Sparse...
Article
Full-text available
Subglacial roughness can be determined at variety of length scales from radio-echo sounding (RES) data; either via statistical analysis of along-track topography, or inferred from basal radar scattering. Past studies have demonstrated that subglacial terrain exhibits self-affine (fractal) scaling behaviour, where vertical roughness has a power-law...
Article
Full-text available
Bed topography is a critical boundary for the numerical modelling of ice sheets and ice-ocean interactions. A persistent issue with existing topography products for the bed of the Greenland Ice Sheet and surrounding sea floor is the poor representation of coastal bathymetry, especially in regions of floating ice and near the grounding line. Sparse...
Article
Full-text available
Radar inference of the bulk properties of glacier beds, most notably identifying basal melting, is, in general, derived from the basal reflection coefficient. On the scale of an ice sheet, unambiguous determination of basal reflection is primarily limited by uncertainty in the englacial attenuation of the radio wave, which is an Arrhenius function...
Article
Full-text available
Many biophotonic structures have their spectral properties of reflection ‘tuned’ using the (zeroth-order) Bragg criteria for phase constructive interference. This is associated with a periodicity, or distribution of periodicities, parallel to the direction of illumination. The polarization properties of these reflections are, however, typically con...
Article
Full-text available
Radar-inference of the bulk properties of glacier beds, most notably identifying basal melting, is, in general, derived from the basal reflection coefficient. On the scale of an ice-sheet, unambiguous determination of basal reflection is primarily limited by uncertainty in the englacial attenuation of the radio wave, which is an exponential functio...
Article
Full-text available
Multilayer optical reflectors constructed from 'stacks' of alternating layers of high and low refractive index dielectric materials are present in many animals. For example, stacks of guanine crystals with cytoplasm gaps occur within the skin and scales of fish, and stacks of protein platelets with cytoplasm gaps occur within the iridophores of cep...
Article
Full-text available
We describe the bi-directed eyes of a mesopelagic teleost fish, Rhynchohyalus natalensis, that possesses an extensive lateral diverticulum to each tubular eye. Each diverticulum contains a mirror that focuses light from the ventro-lateral visual field. This species can thereby visualize both downwelling sunlight and bioluminescence over a wide fiel...
Article
Full-text available
We investigate the polarization dependence of localization length in alternating isotropic-birefringent stacks with uncorrelated thickness disorder. The birefringent layers can be positive uniaxial, negative uniaxial, or a mixture of both. Stacks which contain a mixture are shown to suppress the Brewster delocalization anomalies and, over all incid...
Article
Full-text available
The cornea is the first optical element in the path of light entering the eye, playing a role in image formation and protection. Corneas of vertebrate simple camera-type eyes possess microprojections on the outer surface in the form of microridges, microvilli, and microplicae. Corneas of invertebrates, which have simple or compound eyes, or both, m...
Article
Self-organised criticality (SOC) is a theory of the underlying dynamics of a class of non-equilibrium dynamical systems that are associated with complex, scale-free phenomena. Recently, there has been growing empirical evidence proposed that links the Tropical Con-vective System (TCS) to SOC. This has broad implications for both the theory of SOC a...
Article
Biological multilayer reflectors are common in nature and some are able to reflect light across a broad range of wavelengths with a low degree of polarization over all angles of incidence. This inspired us to examine theoretically possible mechanisms that would allow stacks of biological materials to produce broadband omnidirectional reflections. T...

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