Welcome to our Page!

My name is Will Harcourt and I am an interdisciplinary Fellow at the University of Aberdeen. I am leading the development of a Greenland Ice Sheet digital twin and this website provides details of our groups activities!

Our research spans across multiple disciplines and primarily within the subject areas of remote sensing, glaciology, machine learning, data science, engineering, Arctic science among others. I have a PhD from the University of St Andrews which developed millimetre-wave radar for mapping and monitoring glaciers. I am eager to work with people from a range of disciplines who are interested in similar topics!

I hope you enjoy my page! Please don’t hesitate to get in touch if you want to find out more.

  • Svalbard – continued monitoring of Borebreen’s surge!

    Svalbard – continued monitoring of Borebreen’s surge!

    March and April were hectic with Arctic Science Summit Week, then fieldwork in Svalbard and a trip to Vienna for the annual EGU Assembly. The most exciting trip was, of course, our campaign to Svalbard to continue our monitoring of Borebreen’s active surge. In April, me and colleagues ventured back up to Svalbard to undertake… Read more

  • Visit to Robert Gordon’s College

    Will Harcourt and Morrigan Jones from the Department of Geography, University of Aberdeen, visited Robert Gordon’s College on Wednesday 21st February 2024 to discuss their research on glaciers; both on Earth and Mars! Will Harcourt discussed the importance of glaciers to our society and showcased some amazing stories of his fieldwork in locations such as… Read more

  • New Paper in IEEE Transactions on Geoscience and Remote Sensing!

    New Paper in IEEE Transactions on Geoscience and Remote Sensing!

    We have a new paper out in IEEE Transactions on Geoscience and Remote Sensing (TGARS) entitled: “3D terrain mapping and filtering from coarse resolution data cubes extracted from real-aperture 94 GHz radar”. Link here: https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/10398270 We developed a new workflow to extract point clouds from 3D data cubes acquired using 94 GHz radar, specifically that… Read more

  • New Dramatic Video on our Svalbard Fieldwork in 2023!

    New Dramatic Video on our Svalbard Fieldwork in 2023!

    As we bring 2023 to a close, I would like to share this amazing video that we have created at the University of Aberdeen that dramatically captures the fieldwork we conducted in August 2023. With a big thanks to Euan Wemyss for creating the video and to our field team consisting of myself, Danni Pearce,… Read more

  • Fully-funded PhD Project!

    Fully-funded PhD Project!

    We are now advertising a fully-funded PhD project. The project will investigate how ice melange in Greenland’s fjords are formed and preserved, then how this impacts marine ecosystems. The project will utilise recent advances in deep learning methodologies to automatically extract key parameters of ice melange characteristics (e.g. extent, iceberg concentrations, velocity) and relate this… Read more

  • Will there be a new ocean pathway in Svalbard?

    Will there be a new ocean pathway in Svalbard?

    It’s interesting to visualise glacier changes in Svalbard. At the end of Hornsund fjord, Hornbreen has been retreating consistently. Below is a GIF showing these changes. The glacier shares a catchment with the neighbouring Hambergbreen to the east, which is also retreating. At some point in the future, these 2 glaciers will retreat and lead… Read more