About

Me

Currently: HPC sysadmin.

Formerly: geophysics postdoc.

Research activity (up to 2024-05)

I have worked on signal simulation and detectability analysis in gravimetry, which is the use of gravity measurements (and any disturbing signal with respect to a known reference) to sense the how mass is distributed (and moves) in a planetary body. The topic lies between geophysics and geodesy, mainly - with considerable overlap with other disciplines.

In that context, simulating a signal (forward modelling) may be needed as step in defining an inverse problem (retrieving mass by knowing its observed gravity field), in achieving signal isolation through reduction of data from measurements (when more-or-less known signals are subtracted), or even in assessing if new measurements can sense a signal or if is buried in noise. Those new measurements may be anything from a fieldwork campaign to a constellation of gravimetric satellites, think of the GRACE mission. In the last few years, I have been working on this last application, in support of the “science segment” of the performance assessment of different proposed mission concepts, in sub-contractor units to space agencies projects (see: resume)

Concurrently, I have been busy with other kinds of numerical models in the Earth sciences: the so-called thermo-mechanical modelling, to reconstruct how the crust and lithospheric mantle behaved beneath the southern portion of the Ross Sea, Antarctica, in response to extensional dynamics - part of what we now call the West Antarctica Rift System. Since I am so keen on gravity, I also took the role of turning geodynamical models into synthetic observations of gravity, in two projects. Gravity observations carry less information than a whole model of density in the subsurface, due to superposition of the attraction of all masses and to the ill-placed measurements themselves (outside the planet, for obvious reasons). Thus, forward-modelling these observations from a synthetic Earth model in which we know everything may seem counterintuitive. However, gravity is often one of the few, if not the only, geophysical observables that we have in sparsely surveyed areas. Modelling it allows to put ourselves in a realistic interpretation settings, enabling and almost direct comparison between models and real data.

During my doctoral studies I was instead busy devising a proof-of-concept application of gravimetry to regional scale geothermal estimates, chiefly to fill in surface heat flow maps, as we have done in this paper.

On top of that, I have a limited fieldwork experience (again, on measuring gravity) and an extensive record of keeping a regional tilt-strain measurement network running - which is one of the ways of sensing the deformation of the Earth’s crust, complementary to space geodesy (such as GNSS and InSAR), Speaking of that, I am keenly curious about any other remote sensing technique. Regarding InSAR, I had the pleasure of supporting some technical/infrastructural aspects of a doctoral project on Sentinel 1 data (some automation, migration to HPC), which sparked some collaterals on the topic of mitigation of tropospheric delay.

That’s work and other outlets are better suited in summarizing that. These pages instead serve the purpose of keeping track of stuff that has been fun for the sake of it - if not completely, at least for the most part.

This site

This uses Hugo, with the etch theme.

Deployment uses github actions: from a repository with the blog source (and the theme as a submodule), to my personal github pages repository. The workflow is based on the example found here, which in turn gives credit to the one here. Find it in this gist - note however that it may be outdated.