Sue Digby

This is a picture of me working on pack ice in the Labrador Sea. One of the interesting features were the edges of the floes (floes are the individual pieces of ice). The edges build as the floes rub together as the ocean swell moves through the pack. The edges are very rough and salty; as a result they bounce a lot of RADAR energy back to the instrument. Imagery of this type of ice is very bright.

My career has had several stages, but the various phases of my career fit together reasonably well. I would like to tell you about the various stages because they have all been interesting and rewarding for me.

My life started in Eastern Greenland because my parents were marine biologists and did some of the first work on plankton lifecycles. They stayed in a tiny settlement called Scoresbysund (now called ttoqqortoormiit) and collected plankton using a net, from a boat in the summer, and dynamited holes in the sea ice in the winter. They are very outdoor people, and their philosophy and curiosity about Earth and its oceans has been a major influence in my life.

When I was a child, I lived in England and went to a girls school just south of London. Buller's Wood school consisted of several old houses in 22 acres of wooded grounds. We spent our lunch times exploring overgrown gardens and finding fox and badger dens; I had a lot of fun although I was not a brilliant student. When I was 16, I moved to Canada with my family and went to university where I studied physical geography which concerns processes that form landscapes, climatology, hydrology, and bio-geography. After I got a BS degree, I felt that I wanted to do something that contributed to people, so I got a teaching degree expecting to teach geography and science.

The year that I graduated, there was a huge surplus of teachers, and the only job I could find was one teaching geography, science, and art. However, I had always painted, so I took some more courses and taught art as well. Teaching turned out to be a great experience, and after a few years, I was teaching art full time, and I had students going on to Art College. It was incredibly rewarding, especially on occasions where students having problems in school 'clicked' into art, and I was able to watch their interest in art help them stay in school.

After six years of teaching, I moved to Ottawa, the capital of Canada, and teaching jobs were still very scarce. I was ready for a change and wanted to work in geography, the subject that I had studied in university, so I sent out over a hundred resumes across Canada, and then I got very lucky. I found a job as a sea-ice research assistant with a satellite program called Radarsat.

Radarsat is now a satellite which has a RADAR onboard, and it is, as we speak, orbiting the Earth collecting data, but when I joined it was just an idea on paper. When I joined the Radarsat project, information about sea ice and icebergs was being collected by observers looking out airplane windows, by RADAR in airplanes, and by ships. In designing Radarsat people wanted a more efficient and reliable way to collect information about where ice was and how thick it was. We had a major question that we need to answer in order to design the RADAR instrument: "What types of information can we collect using RADAR and how reliable is the information?"

To answer these questions, there were a series of experiments in arctic Canada and off the coast of Newfoundland and Labrador to study the ice and to find out how it related to RADAR imagery of various wavelengths. (RADAR is very useful because it can 'see' through darkness, clouds and dry snow.) My role was to help plan the experiments, to do fieldwork, and to analyze results. This was fabulous work; I went to very interesting places, worked with interesting people, and I really loved being on the ice. The arctic is very beautiful.

During this period, I went back to school and earned a masters degree. My thesis was on using satellite data to detect the breathing holes that ringed seals make in winter ice. The short story is that the seals keep holes open in the ice year round so they can breath and haul-out in snow caves on the surface of the ice. Then, in spring, the snow melts, and the water runs off down the seal holes so around each seal hole is an area of dry white ice while the rest of the ice is wet and looks dark. These dry areas are about 200 m in diameter and can be seen from a satellite. This only works when you have flat ice, but, from year to year in areas where flat ice always forms, a count of seal holes can provide a measure of the seal population.

I left this job after nine years, by which time I had become the sea-ice coordinator at Canada Center for Remote Sensing.

Then I moved to America, to join my husband, and worked at the interface between scientists and engineers on Cassini, the mission to Saturn at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL). After about two years, I returned to Earth Science, which I had missed, and worked as the head of user services at oceanographic archive. This was actually interesting work, as it involved redesigning how we organized getting data to users and working with scientists. I was there at a great time; the introduction of the web. Our web site in 1993 was one of the early web sites, and it revolutionized getting information and data to people. Much of this job involved ensuring that the archive produced data and information that was useful to scientists.

After a little over five years, I needed a change so I moved to work in outreach with the TOPEX/Poseidon and Jason-1 projects. This job combines my teaching experience and my earth science and data experience. Outreach is the job of providing information to the general public, scientists, students, educators, and to organizations that can use the information in their work. In the case of satellite altimeter data, the information is used by climate forecasters, the fishing industry, by people planning ship routes, etc. Uses of the data are growing as scientists and commercial enterprises become more familiar with the data and as more data becomes available. I am currently working to add a section on these applications to our web page (http://topex-www.jpl.nasa.gov) which you might want to check out. It has some great El Nino/La Nina information.

I know I have written too much here; I wanted to explain that one can have a variety of careers and that skills that are built in one career can transfer to another. I should add that exploring the world and painting are still very important to me, and I am hoping that in the next phase of my career I can somehow tie art and science together! And I want to get back to the Arctic. Somehow this should be possible and I am looking for a way.

Another thing I want to say is that being a woman does not exclude you from interesting jobs. If you have something in mind just 'go for it'. There may be a few extra hurdles, but with persistence and some small amount luck, you will make it.

Archived QuestChats with Susan Digby

• November 4, 1999
• April 22, 1999