Field of knowledge: Geosciences/Aeronomy
Project title: Analysis of Tsunami's generated airglow and design of an 630 nm
Working area: Aeronomy

Summary: Opportunity for 1 PhD scholarship from FAPESP and CNES in collaboration with the IPGP Paris. The program is to attend the INPE´s lectures with FAPESP scholarship, followed by a stage at IPGP, Paris with CNES support and then the student should come back to INPE to finish and to present the PhD dissertation.

Following the first observation of 630 nm airglow over Hawaii associated to the tsunami of Tohoku-Oki, March 2011, a full understanding and modeling of this signals is requested, in order to not only understand their amplitudes their arrival time (including for percursors signals) and their waveform, but also to assess the possibility to detect such signals from space, with an airglow camera, either with night time only systems (e.g. 630 nm) or with day/night systems (e.g. UV and Far UV airglow). Such space based system will allow, from a science point of view, to image the waveform structure of the tsunami and, for more operational system, to provide very rapid ( e.g. < 10 minutes) estimations of the amplitude of the tsunami. We propose therefore this thesis to be focuse on both a modeling effort and a hardware effort.The hardware effort will be to design, built and test the breadboard of a 630 nm interferometer filter and imager compatible for integration on the 3U Univearth-1 nanosatellite, which has been recently funded through the selection of the Labex UniverEarth-1. This will be based on the integration of COST hardware, such as filters used already for ground based imager or micro-camera similar to those developed for Planetary exploration. These hardware activities, at least at the level of the breadboard, will be funded by the LABEX UnivEarth.The modeling effort will be on the analysis of the Tohoku-Hawaii airglow data, in order to validate the detection capability from space orbit, as a function of the altitude, of the aperture of the camera, integration time and instrument photon noise of the detectors and to provide a first mission analysus. It will integrate the modeelng of the tsunami generated signal in the Earth neutral atmosphere, as well as its coupling to the ionosphere and modeling of the airglow generation. Other airglow line will also be studied, inclusing in UV, in order to study the possibility of future, more ambitious, airglow imagers on GEOs. In addition to IPGP and INPE, there will be collaboration with the University of Illinois (J .Makella).

Interested students, with a master program in one related area or finishing the master program, should send an email to Eurico at eurico@dae.inpe.br up to March 31, 2012.