Earth and Environmental Sciences (SEES)
Environmental Monitoring and Modelling - Dr Malcolm Whitworth
Staff. Baily, Burridge, Dewdney, Fowler, Gibson, Giles, Inkpen, Koor, Rust, Solana, Teeuw, Watson
Landslide Enhanced Models of Engineering Geology
The Hampshire Basin, in which Portsmouth sits, provides us with a great opportunity to examine techniques to model and understand the evolution of a complex sedimentary basin and to apply this knowledge to predict geotechnical properties. Key to this research is the demonstration that a detailed understanding of landslides, their occurrence, morphology, and stability characteristics can be used to improve geotechnical models where there may be limited physical data. This work, in partnership with the British Geological Survey is funded by the Royal Thai Government.
PhD Student Mrs Kwanjai Yuangdetkla
Landscape evolution and disasters
Landscape evolution plays an important role in the precursory conditions for many natural hazards, defining topography, and controlling the rate and magnitude of ground movement. Using mountainous and coastal landscapes in Asia, Europe and Africa we are examining how different tectonic and denudation processes combine to produce terrains with different hazard potentials. Our work involves combining high resolution optical and radar remote sensing with field exploration, before and after disaster events. Work is supported by NERC (Zhouqu and El Hierro), the Leverhulme Trust (Dominica, Sri Lanka) and NATO (Kyrgyzstan) and the Royal Thai Government, in collaboration with partners including Loughborough University, the British Geological Survey, CSNI Bari and Lanzhou University.
PhD Student Namphon Khampilang
GIS for monitoring, Modelling and Managing Flooding and Coastal Change
Important, but sensitive habitats and communities are concentrated in our coastal areas. Understanding how different coastal terrains will react to environmental change, predicting how they will evolve in the future and providing this information to management authorities is being researched using remote sensing, GIS. Work on the south coast of England is carried out with support from the Environment Agency, English Nature, Posford Haskoning, Havant Borough Council, Chichester Harbour Conservancy and the National Trust. With the Ordnance Survey, we are using existing attribute and metadata in the Solent Region to identify vulnerable areas and model how they might be affected by rising sea levels. In Lagos, Nigeria our work centres on the development of a data and computationally efficient flood risk model.
PhD Student, Miss Sarah Percival
PhD Student, Mr Ugonna Nkwunonwo
Monitoring and Modelling Hazardous Dusts
Working with DustScan Ltd, Grundon Waste Management and Leeds University, we are examining several aspects of contamination including metal partitioning in rocks and soils; bioaccessibility of micronutrients and toxic metals; metal chemistry; and source attribution of nuisance dust.
The work centres upon the development of new, efficient techniques to measure and monitor the movement of fugitive dusts. The work has been supported since 2007 by a combination of NERC/TSB Knowledge Transfer Grants.
PhD Student Ben Williams