Thomas Olmsted Teisberg

I’m working on accelerating of understanding of Earth’s ice sheets by improving the ways we use observational data to imform ice sheet models. I’m currently a resident at Astera Institute.

I did my PhD in the Stanford Radio Glaciology Lab, advised by Prof. Dusty Schroeder. As an engineer in a geophysics group, I designed radar instrumentation for studying Earth’s ice sheets. I spent most of my Ph.D. co-developing ORCA (Open Radar Code Architecture) and using it to develop and test Peregrine, a field-portable small fixed-wing UAV equipped with a miniaturized ice-penetrating radar.

I’m also interested in new ice-penetrating radar applications enabled by cheaper, more repeatable surveying, especially radar interferometry to better understand englacial motion.

I developed and maintain a data portal for accessing an archive of early ice-penetrating radar data collected in the 1970s and 1980s over Antarctica and Greenland. In many cases this data predates any nearby modern radar data by several decades, extending our historical view and improving our understanding of how the ice sheets are evolving.

Email is the best way to get in touch!

selected publications

Open Radar Code Architecture (ORCA): A Platform for Software-defined Coherent Chirped Radar Systems

Thomas O. Teisberg^*, Anna L. Broome^*, and Dustin M. Schroeder
*Equal contribution

IEEE Transactions on Geoscience and Remote Sensing, 2024

Abs DOI PDF Website

Ice-penetrating radar systems are critical instruments for observing the subsurface conditions on Earth’s ice sheets. Traditionally, ice-penetrating radars have not been widely accessible to the glaciological community (as in the case of resource-intensive airborne systems) and/or have been limited in their ability to be reconfigured and optimized for studying different glaciological targets (as in the case of hardware-defined radar systems). To alleviate the challenges associated with this situation, we have developed the Open Radar Code Architecture (ORCA), which is an open-source radar software codebase that allows commercially available software-defined radios (SDRs) to be used as coherent ice-penetrating radars. Here, we describe the architecture of our code, characterize coherence on SDRbased radars, and demonstrate techniques we use to improve SNR and overall performance. We also highlight the variety of SDR options available to potential users and discuss tradeoffs between different system configurations.
Studying Climate Change With an Ice Radar Drone

Thomas O. Teisberg

IEEE Spectrum, Oct 2023

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