Winner: Susanna Ebmeier

University of Leeds.

Title: Satellite monitoring of volcanic unrest and eruption

Abstract:

Satellite imagery provides a unique window into volcano and magmatic processes, providing potentially global measurements of deformation, degassing and thermal emissions.  These measurements illuminate stages of magmatism spanning from pluton growth, to landscape formation to the environmental impact of volcanic eruptions.  Satellite radar measurements, in particular, capture processes associated with the movement of magma in the Earth’s crust and can play a role in forecasting the development of unrest and duration of eruptions.

The advent of freely available, systematically acquired satellite imagery, requires new automated approaches to processing and analysis. However, it also presents new opportunities for global analysis of data, allowing analysis of relationships between unrest at volcanoes across a whole region, rather than on a individual basis.  My research focuses on how to extract volcanologically useful parameters from satellite imagery, with a particular focus on Interferomentric Synthetic Aperture Radar. This involves the application of signal processing methods such as source separation and unsupervised classification.  Understanding volcanic deformation also requires advancing our understanding of crustal rheology and how our approximations affect modelling of surface deformation.

Less than 35 % of the worlds 600 potentially active volcanoes have continual ground-based monitoring infrastructure.  In this context, optimising the information we can draw from global satellite imagery is critical not only for our fundamental understanding of volcanism, but for monitoring their hazards.