ESSC Members

Jonathan Bamber

University of Bristol, UK

Research Interests

The ice sheets covering Antarctica and Greenland and their contribution to sea level

Prof Jonathan Bamber is professor of Earth Observation and glaciology, University of Bristol and currently Director of the Bristol Glaciology Centre. He has a degree in physics (Bristol) and a PhD in glaciology/remote sensing (Cambs). He has >35 years of experience in the analysis of airborne & satellite data sets from the polar regions, specialising in combining these data with models of the cryosphere-climate system. He is an expert on the ice sheets covering Antarctica and Greenland and their contribution to sea level. He has also published extensively in the general field of geodesy, covering mapping of the surface topography of the Earth, sea level variations in time and space and measuring mass exchange between the land and oceans due to melting of land ice and the hydrological cycle.

He has published > 200 peer-reviewed articles on these topics and has been acknowledged as a Highly Cited Researcher since 2018 by the Institute for Scientific Information, one of around 200 in the discipline worldwide. In 2019 he was elected a Fellow of the American Geophysical Union. From 2016-2020, Bamber was the President-Elect and then President of the European Geosciences Union, the premier organisation of its kind in Europe, responsible for an annual General Assembly attracting >16,000 participants and publisher for 19 Open Access journals. He is a regular contributor to media activities including print, radio and television and has been involved in, for example, several Discovery Channel series, BBC radio programmes, numerous newspaper articles and policy briefing documents for government and NGOs. Bamber has been involved in various ESA mission studies as a member of expert and advisory groups related to altimetry, SAR and gravity missions as well as NASA programmes, panels and projects.