Dear Colleagues

Please distribute this to students interested in undertaking a PhD in data science/geodesy. The project is well supported with a $12k/yr topup and substantial project support, and an internship with Geoscience Australia.

Together with CSIRO and Geoscience Australia I am pleased to advertise a new and well supported Industry PhD project.

The project seeks to improve the accuracy of estimates of Australia's 3D motion and deformation. The improved vertical land motion estimates from this PhD will then be applied to improve our understanding of sea level rise around our coastlines.

This collaboration between CSIRO Data61, UTAS and Geoscience Australia will develop novel unsupervised machine learning approaches to detect hidden and subtle changes in highly precise measurements of Earth's changing shape. 

Hundreds of continuous GNSS sites now operate across Australia, and tens of thousands globally, allowing Earth's 3D motion to be theoretically tracked at the millimetre level. However, the utility of these data is degraded by undiagnosed and hidden changes in the time series due to hardware, geophysical or environmental changes. Robust and repeatable automated techniques are currently less accurate than laborious manual expert human analysis. 

Novel methods that detect hidden, subtle changes in high-precision continuous GNSS time series will be developed and then applied to publicly available data from Australian GNSS sites. This work will improve satellite positioning products used by Australian industry, government and researchers. For instance, quality-controlled data products will improve our understanding of Australia's vertical land motion, and this will directly improve estimates of sea-level rise. Other applications include improving knowledge of the present-day strain of the Australian crust, yielding insights into seismic risk. The developed methods will be operationalised at Geoscience Australia.

This exciting and well-supported project allows a candidate to work on a pressing societal problem and work closely with partners in CSIRO Datat61 and Geoscience Australia. The project will include an internship with Geoscience Australia. There is a global shortage of experts in this area, including within Australia. The expertise provided in this PhD will place the candidate as one of Australia's experts in geodetic data analysis, of which Geoscience Australia is the national lead.

The student will work with a great team including me (Primary Supervisor), Daniel Smith (CSIRO Data61), Anna Riddell (GA), and Christopher Watson (UTAS).

Please get in touch with me if you have any questions. Please note applications will only be considered from Australian citizens or Permanent Residents, or a New Zealand citizens.

Matt King

Professor of Polar Geodesy | Director of the Australian Centre for Excellence in Antarctic Science

School of Geography, Planning, and Spatial Sciences | University of Tasmania

Postal: Private Bag 76, University of Tasmania, Hobart, Tasmania, 7001, Australia

Office: Room 109F (IMAS Salamanca) | Room 422, Centenary South (Sandy Bay Campus)

+61 3 6226 1974 | Matt.King@utas.edu.au | BlueSky  https://bsky.app/profile/deformedearth.bsky.social

http://www.utas.edu.au/profiles/staff/geography-spatial/matt-king | http://antarctic.org.au/  | https://scholar.google.com.au/citations?user=GIX6aNgAAAAJ&hl=en

CRICOS 00586B

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