Track: High School STEM Competition

Abstract

This STEM paper will study the Time Series Antarctic Glacier Mass from April 2002 to March 2021. The objective of this paper is to forecast the Antarctic Glacier Mass level for 2021 to 2041. Among the four STEM components, the science studied is the geoscience of glaciers, technology included is the GRACE-FO satellites to collect Glacier Ice Sheet Mass data, Engineering focuses on the COVID-19 impact on the Glacier melting rate, and mathematical models like Time Series Decomposition and Smoothing were implemented. Several Time Series Decomposition methods such as the detrended, season-adjusted, and differencing were utilized to detect the strength of time series “Trend” and “Seasonal” components. 12-month seasonal pattern and long-term year to year trend were significantly observed. Although the Glacier meting rate sped up recently before 2020, the COVID-19 situation has slowed down the rate of glacier melting in 2020 in both Antarctic and Greenland. Smoothing models were also utilized to smooth out the random noise component to enhance the forecasting model. Several smoothing models were compared using their forecasting capability regarding both the trend and seasonal components.  The prediction interval for forecasting Glacier Mass for 2021 to 2041 would become too wide to predict the future Glacier melting rate for more than 5 years in advance. This STEM Time Series Analysis methodology can be commonly applied to any Time Series data in several fields such as Climatology, Geoscience, Finance, Economics, Production Quality, Real Estate.