Dr N Forsythe
No more applications being accepted
Competition Funded PhD Project (European/UK Students Only)
About the Project
Major Asian river basins arising from the Tibetan Plateau are highly dependent on water resources for food security, employment in agricultural industries. River-based infrastructure also makes important contributions to electricity supplies through hydro-electric schemes. MODIS imagery has successfully been used to monitor Snow Covered Area (SCA), Land Surface Temperature (LST) and Cloud Cover Fraction (CCF) but only began in the year 2000, restricting its use for assessing climate change processes and impacts. Despite having a relatively limited spectral resolution, AVHRR imagery has also been shown to have potential for estimating these spatial variables and has an archive of roughly 40 years of data. In terms of methodology the project may comprise :
[1] Calibration and validation of AVHRR-derived data products (against MODIS equivalents) through systematic testing of algorithm variants to minimise bias and error.
[2] Spatiotemporal analyses of resultant multi-decadal datasets to assess recent trends and identify potential causal mechanisms for observed variability.
[3] Comparison of estimated trends and relationships to causal mechanisms to those identified in local observations and gridded datasets.
[4] Compare performance metrics in spatial data-assimilated land surface/hydrological model(s) constructed solely with local observations to test for and quantify any performance enhancement.
Funding Notes
This project would suit a candidate with a broad background in any combination of civil engineering (water resources emphasis), physical geography, geoscience, maths, physics and computational sciences.
This project is part of the ONE Planet DTP. Find out more here: https://research.ncl.ac.uk/one-planet/
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