Profile: Ahmed Eldeeb

Spruce Creek High School, Florida, USA

I am an Egyptian American that identifies as an activist-citizen interested in addressing the intersectionality of health and sustainable research with the climate crisis through means of education.

This past summer, I worked with NASA on a project pertaining to the climate, specifically on modeling the effects of increasing temperatures. Sea ice monitoring is a primary indicator of climate change and an evolving environment due to the ice coverages sensitivity to rising temperatures. Changing climatic systems have influenced Antarctic sea ice volatility, with an all time low in 2017, causing large inter-annual reproductive variability in species that depend on the ice. This work utilized ICESat-2 LiDAR data, specifically ICESs ATL07 Sea Ice Height and ATL10 Sea Ice Freeboard, and Landsat 8 visible imagery to estimate the sea ice volume and extent during the emperor penguins peak hunting seasons for 2018-2020. The methods support the conclusions that the penguin populations rely heavily on sea ice for propagation and livelihood. The project serves as a small-scale remote sensing analysis of emperor penguins while contributing to global research of fluctuating sea ice levels under climate change.