About Me

I am a fourth-year PhD candidate in Atmospheric and Oceanic Sciences at the University of Colorado Boulder. I study firn processes on the Antarctic and Greenland Ice Sheets and am interested in better understanding the interactions between the atmosphere and the surface of ice sheets. My main tool for studying these interactions is the firn model SNOWPACK, which I use to simulate firn processes across ice sheets.

Curriculum vitae (updated 26 January 2024)

Education

PhD in Atmospheric and Oceanic Sciences

University of Colorado Boulder, in progress
Advisors: Dr. Jennifer Kay & Dr. Bradley Markle

MS in Geology

University of Wyoming, 2020
Advisor: Dr. Neil Humphrey

BS in Geology; BS in Environmental Science

University of Massachusetts Amherst, 2017
Advisor: Dr. Isla Castañeda

Publications

The Firn Symposium Team (35 authors including Thompson-Munson, M.). (2024). Firn on Ice Sheets. Nature Reviews Earth & Environment. link

Thompson-Munson, M., Wever, N., Stevens, C.M., Lenaerts, J.T.M., and Medley, B. (2023). An evaluation of a physics-based firn model and a semi-empirical firn model across the Greenland Ice Sheet (1980-2020). The Cryosphere. PDF

Maclennan, M.L., Lenaerts, J.T.M., Shields, C.A., Hoffman, A.O., Wever, N., Thompson-Munson, M., Winters, A.C., Pettit, E.C., Scambos, T.A., Wille, J.D. (2023). Climatology and Surface Impacts of Atmospheric Rivers on West Antarctica. The Cryosphere. PDF

Lam, A., Bauer, J.E., Fraass, S., Sheffield, S., Limbeck, M.R., Borden, R.M., Thompson-Munson, M., Fraass, A.J., Hills, J.M., Muskelly, C.E., Hartshorn, K.R., and Bryant, R. (2019). Time Scavengers: An Educational Website to Communicate Climate Change and Evolutionary Theory to the Public through Blogs, Web Pages, and Social Media Platforms. The Journal of STEM Outreach, 2(1). PDF

Datasets, Tools, and Resources

SUMup

This database contains millions of measurements of surface mass balance components from ice sheets and sea ice. The database contains four subdatasets: (1) snow and firn density on ice sheets, (2) accumulation rates on ice sheets, (3) 10-m borehole temperatures, and (4) snow depth on sea ice.

SUMMEDup2022

This Python package is a tool for processing and plotting data from the SUMup database. I developed this tool with support from EarthCube. The latest version is compatible with the latest SUMup release.

SUMMEDup Tuturial

I led a portion of the EarthCube Learning Communities Fellowship tutorial where I demonstrated SUMMEDup, which is a tool I developed to use with the SUMup dataset. Check out the slides here, or watch the recorded tutorial here.

Icebergs on AntarcticGlaciers.org

Check out this page about icebergs that I wrote for AntarcticGlaciers.org.

Icebergs on GlacierHub

I was interviewed about icebergs for the article, “How Does an Iceberg Really Float?”, on GlacierHub. Read the article here.

How do icebergs float?

Check out my tweet about how icebergs float here and be sure to try out Josh Tauberer’s Iceberger website to draw an iceberg and see how it floats.