Overview
Geophysical sensing and imaging play a key underpinning role in many applied geoscience activities including ore deposit discovery, sub-sea marine geoscience and geohazard estimation. Geophysical imaging involves three main steps: sensing, data processing and data inversion (constructing a ‘model’ or image from ‘data’). The quality of the images is dependent on the quality/quantity of the sensors, the data processing procedures and the mathematical algorithms used to ‘invert’ the data.
Our geophysics research aims to provide the cohesive sensing and imaging infrastructure to enable iCRAG’s challenge-based research. We are driving new methodological developments in this area using Ireland as a geographical test bed and comparing noise images to images produced using teleseismic earthquakes. Ireland is ideally located to advance this research field, with some of the world’s highest levels of background seismic noise, generated by ocean waves in the north-east Atlantic.
Research activities are focussed on the following areas:
- Data network integration and data assimilation
- Geophysical data inversion
- Targeted shallow crustal models
- Baseline seismicity studies in Ireland
- Noise correlation methodological development
- Pseudo real time data processing and analysis
