Natalia Galin
Natalia Galin, currently 24, graduated with Bachelor of Electrical Engineering from University of New South Wales in 2006, earning first class honors with her project Hardware Implementation of the Discrete Wavelet Transform for JPEG2000, which at the time was one of the fastest and most memory efficient DWT architectures in published literature. She later worked as a contractor for Agere Systems, Australia in 3G mobile technology development, contributing to next generation wireless microchips.
Her interest in the study of the Earth's climate and what factors affect it and how, led her to pursue a PhD in helping understand the very important role that sea ice plays in this process. The significance of sea ice on global climate is only just being recognised and an accurate assessment of snow depth covering this ice is needed to enable researchers to determine the depth of the sea ice itself. Subsequently, in addition to learning the geophysical aspects of snow and sea ice, it is this 'Remote Sensing of Snow Depth over Sea Ice' which forms the main aim of Natalia's PhD.
In her spare time Natalia enjoys scuba diving, trekking, hobby electronics, dancing, playing her guitar and singing. She has also recently gained her Advanced Amateur Radio certificate (VK2WNG), and is looking forward to perhaps having the opportunity to be on air during the voyage!
Project description:
In June of this year Natalia traveled to Kansas University – Centre for Remote Sensing of Ice Sheets, where she helped construct a radar system for estimating the snow depth over sea ice. The radar is to be mounted on a helicopter and flown over the Antarctic sea ice on the SIPEX 2007 voyage. Hopefully the data gathered during the voyage will lead to further recommendations for the next generation of this radar system, provide a means for validating the AMRS-E snow depth algorithm (currently the only satellite with a snow depth product), and possibly some insight into the unique characteristics of snow in Antarctica, which differs from the snow cover in the Arctic.
e-mail: ngalin AT utas.edu.au