How do different volcanic deposits affect surface scattering characteristics (e.g., surface roughness and local gradient) at different wavelengths and polarisations?

Edna is currently an ESA Living Planet Fellow at the University of Bristol, UK. She completed a PhD in volcano remote sensing at the University of Leeds, UK in 2022 where her research focused on using high resolution Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) to examine volcanic deposits. During her PhD she worked closely with the Centre for Observation and Modelling of Earthquakes, Volcanoes and Tectonics (COMET) and Committee on Earth Observation Satellites (CEOS) Volcano Demonstrator.

Following her PhD, she became a post-doc on the Imaging Magmatic Architecture using Strain Tomography (MAST) project at the University of Bristol. Her work here focused on using Interferometric SAR (InSAR) to monitoring volcanic unrest and examine the long-term trends and patterns of ground deformation at caldera systems around the world.

Research objectives

• Investigate the contributions of individual surface scattering properties, especially surface roughness, caused by a range of volcanic processes and their effect on the backscatter signal
• Develop methods that are easily transferable between volcanoes in different eruptive settings and using different SAR sensors
• Build an operational tool using the Sentinel-1 dataset that can automatically flags changes in SAR backscatter potentially related to volcanic activity.