I would like to draw your attention to a fully funded PhD working on the development and testing of low cost Eddy Covariance. See full details here: The funding for this PhD is open to UK/EU/International applicants and the deadline for applications is the 14th January 2019. If your interested, please feel free to get in touch!
Background: Changing climate and land-use are affecting carbon dioxide (CO2) fluxes between the land-surface and the atmosphere. Recent climate mitigation approaches – such as carbon sequestration using Nature Based Solutions (NBS) – mean that it vital we have the tools to verify their success. Therefore, it is becoming increasingly important to accurately quantify these exchanges of CO2 at the ecosystem level.
The Challenge: The Eddy Covariance (EC) technique has the capability to provide the most direct measures of carbon dioxide (CO2) exchange between the land-surface and the atmosphere for whole ecosystems (Baldocchi, 2008). Indeed, in recent decades EC has become the state of the art for measuring whole ecosystem fluxes. In theory, at least, EC is ideally suited to monitoring and verifying the rates of carbon (C) sequestration achieved by Nature Based Solutions (NBS). However, the prohibitively high costs associated with conventional EC systems have presented a significant barrier to their widespread adoption (Hill, 2017).
The PhD: In this PhD, you will join a project – funded by Shell – to improve low cost EC instrumentation and to facilitate the monitoring and verification of carbon sequestration projects. You will help improve and test the low cost EC system by developing and testing instruments and/or developing data logging and processing software. The developments will be tested both in the laboratory, and during field work at the Rothamsted Research Farm platform in North Wyke, Devon, a National Capability funded by the BBSRC (Orr et al., 2016; https://www.rothamsted.ac.uk/north-wyke-farm-platform).
This PhD would suit a motivated candidate, who is interested in improving our understanding of environmental science through designing and building new instrumentation (including the physical hardware and/or the analysis software).