PhD Studentship - Joint Analysis of Volcanic Degassing and Deformation Time Series to Understand Transitions in Unrest

Research theme: Volcanology

How to apply: uom.link/pgr-apply-2425

This 3.5 year PhD is jointly funded by the Centre for Observation and Modelling of Volcanoes, Earthquakes and Tectonics (COMET) and the University of Manchester's School of Natural Sciences. The funding is, regrettably, for UK domestic students only. The funding will cover tuition fees and provide an annual tax-free stipend set at the UKRI rate (£19,237 for 2024/25). The project starts in September 2025.

In this project, we will use global satellite observations of volcanic gas emissions and deformation to characterise unrest on a multi-year, multi-volcano scale. This work is especially timely given the improved temporal resolution and sensitivity of degassing time series made possible by the ESA satellite-based TROPOMI instrument (Esse et al. 2024; McCormick Kilbride et al., 2023) and the recently developed LiCSAR Sentinel-1 InSAR Processor toolkit, which enables ready access to and analysis of thousands of interferograms across hundreds of volcanoes (Lazecký et al., 2020; Reddin et al., 2023). The integration of degassing and displacement time series and analysis of their co-variance or independence will advance the characterisation of unrest, conceptual models of activity and detection of potential eruption precursors.

If appointed to this project, you will initially focus on generating and exploring multi-year satellite-derived SO2 gas emission time series for a global suite of volcanoes and refining automatically processed displacement time series obtained from satellite radar. You will benefit from the wealth of satellite observations available (Sentinel-5P/TROPOMI for SO2, Sentinel-1 for deformation) and newly developed algorithms and software tools for extracting volcanological data from these observations (e.g. PlumeTraj, LiCSAR). You will interpret the co-variation of emissions and deformation at Earth’s active volcanoes, identifying which volcanoes are deforming, degassing, both, or neither, and then evaluating how emissions and ground deformation evolve through time. You will explore transitions in unrest from quiescence to eruption, or the evolution of eruptive style, e.g. from effusive to explosive, and how these changes are represented in degassing and deformation time series and how they vary within different classical groupings of volcanoes, e.g. dome-building systems. You will develop criteria for robustly determining transitions in activity state and, from there, categorisation schemes to group volcanoes based on common patterns of unrest or eruptive behaviour. These schemes will be compared to groupings of volcanoes established in earlier work (Biggs, Ebmeier et al., 2014) and used to evaluate existing conceptual models of unrest (Reath et al., 2020), extending and refining these as our new observations permit.

You should have, or expect to achieve, an excellent academic record (First-class or 2.1) in Geophysics, Geology, Earth Sciences, Planetary Sciences or another related physical science discipline (MSc, MSci or BSc). This project would suit a student interested in volcanic hazards and magmatic processes, and the use of remote sensing techniques to solve geological problems. Prior experience in programming and the analysis of satellite data sets would be an advantage but you will be trained in all necessary techniques by the supervisory team. You will be encouraged to attend national and international conferences to share your research.

Before you apply, please contact the main supervisor, Dr. Mccormick Kilbride - brendan.mccormickkilbride@manchester.ac.uk; please include a CV and a paragraph describing your motivation to study this PhD project.

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